


Chaos Will Calcify

by pennflinn



Series: Monsters Create Monsters [3]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Injury, Brainwashing, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Killer Frost origins, Medical Experimentation, Non-Consensual Injections, POV Caitlin Snow, Psychological Torture, Team as Family, Whump, lots of italics, who knows how canon fits in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-08-29 12:23:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 39,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8489533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennflinn/pseuds/pennflinn
Summary: “Do your worst,” Caitlin said. “I’m not going to make it easy for you.”“Oh, I never said it would be easy.” Eiling’s lips curled. “But, believe me, by the end of this, I’ll have you murdering your own friends.”-Sealed away in General Eiling's facility, Caitlin faces the aftermath of her and Barry's botched rescue attempt. With each passing minute, chances of escape grow slimmer, and the threat of Killer Frost continues its steady advance.Takes place immediately after "Collapse Will Follow."





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...we're back! I am so excited to bring you this final part of the Monsters series (and who knew it would become the beast that it is). If you haven't read the previous two, I suggest doing that to get some context, because this picks up immediately following "Collapse." Before we get started, just a couple of notes/warnings:
> 
> I was prompted to start posting this today because I read the summary of 3x07 "Killer Frost," and it only added to my anxieties that some elements of this story are following the show's storyline too closely for comfort, even though I have been working on this since way before the season started. I want to be upfront and say that if it seems like later on down the road that I am copying from the show...I'm really not. I hope you can still find some enjoyment in this even if it's already being done on network TV!
> 
> I also want to say upfront that this is a lot darker than the previous two parts of the series! I will post any unusual warnings before each chapter, but just know that this story deals a lot with torture and brainwashing, and includes descriptions of violence and psychological manipulation. Please, please, please keep yourselves safe as you read, and if you ever feel like it's going too dark and need to stop reading, no hard feelings on my part!
> 
> All that said, let's get this angst party started. Enjoy!

It might have been winter, but Frost couldn't feel it. She was long past feeling cold, and she was long past keeping track of sunrises and sunsets. The last indicator of season she had seen was while she'd been robbing a bank in Coast City—two of the men she'd threatened had been in shorts, and one woman in a tank top—but that could have been days or weeks ago, or longer. Everything blended together in the stony bunkers and listless sleeps.

This place, though: this place was familiar. It appeared cold, and perhaps that was why she was attracted to it, had always been attracted to it. The tall silver buildings glimmered with moonlight, their faces reflecting sky but unable to see it. These walls were sheer, and lifeless, and monotone, walls of conformity.

An itch.

Frost looked down the near-empty street at a flicker of golden light, her attention snagged for an instant. But it was only a streetlight changing from green to red. The yellow disappeared, and the itch faded.

She'd been given specific instructions where to go, what to do. Even though the map of this place felt ingrained in her memory, she followed the General's instructions to a T. She turned down a dark street, passing a group of strange old men huddling for warmth, turned again. It seemed a roundabout way. She supposed it was a revised course, one designed to keep her in the darkest alleys and smallest spaces. No need to draw attention to herself until absolutely necessary.

Oh, but it would be necessary, she heard herself think. It might have been the General speaking, too, his parting words ringing of chaos. We'll want a spectacle, Frost.

She stopped at the end of a long alley and looked down at her hands. They were trembling, curiously. Not from cold, never from cold. Even if it was winter, she would not shiver. Temporarily thrown from her mission, she blinked upward, lost. A flash of yellow headlights disoriented her even more, and her eyes followed the light to a storefront across the way, crystalline. The sign on the front read, "Bank of Central City."

 _Central City_.

The name resonated with the same familiarity as the buildings. _Central City._

The General's voice came back, then, solid and triumphant and anarchic all at once.

_The destination: Central City. The target: The Flash._

Frost's lips curled upward into a smile, and all hesitation evaporated. Ice crackled around her hands, and, all at once, the trembling stopped.

* * *

_The knockout gas at least got a laugh out of General Eiling._

_The tiny, once-promising device that held the gas tumbled its hiding place in Caitlin's bra as she traded all of her clothes for something akin to a medical gown. She'd never been to prison before, but she imagined it might be something like this: the lack of privacy, the surrender of personal belongings, the tiny cold rooms. At least they hadn't made her do the squat-and-cough test, as Cisco had always so tactfully called it. He loved his prison break shows, and he fancied himself an expert on all of the lingo. Now, Caitlin was doubtful he would be of any help if he were here._

_It was a small blessing, at least, that it seemed as though Barry and Canton had managed to get away without further harm—she assumed, anyway, since nobody had come to gloat about re-capturing them. Eiling and the soldiers had been fairly level, aside from guffawing at her attempted modesty and laughing openly at her proposed means of escape. If she was honest with herself, the knockout gas did seem a bit silly now that she thought about it. But perhaps that was just a symptom of her hope evaporating._

_After everything had been taken from her, the door slammed. In her starchy hospital gown, alone in a ten-by-ten cell with no furniture and no warmth, Caitlin pressed herself against the wall and drew her knees up to her chest. With Eiling's new serum still raging through her, she didn't feel cold—it was impossible to feel cold now that she had Killer Frost's powers in her bloodstream, she reasoned—but she reached out for it._

_Logically, the cell_ had _to be wintry. It was in a concrete bunker. Eiling's facility had no heating system, not that she had seen. Under normal circumstances, goosebumps should have been erupting over her arms and legs. But they weren't._

_So Caitlin closed her eyes, and willed herself to be freezing. Willed herself to feel the chill, to feel something._

_When Eiling later strode back into the room, Caitlin was still curled in that position. Her eyes flew open at his entrance, and instinctively she stood and backed flush against the wall._

_"_ _How do you like your new quarters?" he asked, with a false air of cheeriness. No warmth in his voice, either. "Settling in? I hope you've found everything you need."_

_"_ _I don't care what you do to me," Caitlin said, one fist absently clenching the side of her hospital gown, needing to feel something solid in her hands. "You think you're going to make a weapon out of me, but you're wrong."_

_"_ _I_ know _I'm going to make a weapon out of you," Eiling said gleefully. "You're Killer Frost."_

_"_ _I'm not," Caitlin said. "Killer Frost is a meta from another dimension. Another earth. Another reality. That's not who I am."_

_"_ _Maybe not yet," Eiling said. "But you will be."_

_The urge to kill him, to ice him, to end him, was strong, but she buried it back under. If she was going to make it out of this, if she was going to last long enough for her friends to rescue her, she couldn't kill Eiling. Killer Frost or not, she knew the other soldiers would end her if she touched a hair on their General's head._

_"_ _Do your worst," she said. "I'm not going to make it easy for you."_

_"_ _Oh, I never said it would be easy." Eiling's lips curled. "But, believe me, by the end of this, I'll have you murdering your own friends."_

_"_ _Fat chance," Caitlin breathed, though Eiling's words, and the confidence with which he said them, sent an unbidden spike of fear to her core._

_Eiling only nodded. "Enjoy your stay."_

_He turned on his heels. The door closed, the lock grated into place. Caitlin waited another few moments, half expecting someone to come back immediately with a table full of torture instruments. But after a minute or two, the cell remained in silence, and she realized that she was truly on her own._

_Exhausted, Caitlin sank back to the ground. Her whole body shook with exertion, with panic, with unbridled emotion. An hour before, back when she'd been convinced her plan could succeed, she'd made peace with the fact that there were probably a dozen people watching her at all times in this facility. The same thought crossed her mind now, and, once again, she found that she didn't care. She buried her face in her hands and wept, not caring, not caring, not caring—_

_It was only after feeling something scratchy on her palms that she realized that the tears were freezing solid on her cheeks._

_Miserable, she curled up in a ball in the corner of the cell. The corner felt to be the safest place, at least. She had no idea when the soldiers or scientists would return to begin their experimentation, and there was no point in trying to stay alert or dignified until then. At least she had the illusion of solitude, of comfort, in her own cell._

_So, knowing she probably wouldn't get a wink of sleep, she closed her eyes._

_Blue._

_At first, she thought the flicker of blue was a byproduct of her new ice powers, and perhaps that was what it was—but then it continued to flicker, somehow more warm in its blue-ness than frost was, then intercut with black._

A seizure _, Caitlin thought._ I'm having a seizure.

_But her eyes remained closed, and she watched, as if having a daydream, the scene blooming in front of her. It was the STAR Labs cortex. Joe, Iris, and Cisco were idling around the center table with harried expressions on their faces. Iris sat pale in one of the chairs, clutching a wad of cloth to her still-bleeding arm. Cisco looked more ragged than ever, the aftermath of trauma written across his face, his eyes vacant._

_"_ _Anything, Cisco?" Joe asked, hoarse._

_"_ _I've been trying to contact Barry and Caitlin through a vibe," Cisco said. "I don't think I can get through, though. It's too…it's too hard…"_

_"_ _It's okay," Iris reassured. "You've been through a lot. We don't even know if communication through a vibe is possible."_

_"_ _Yeah." Cisco didn't look convinced. "I just wish…there must be some way to find out what's going on, what's taking them so long."_

_"_ _Yeah, Caitlin should've activated the knockout gas by now," Joe said. "Something must have happened."_

_"_ _There's got to be something we can do." Iris stood resolutely, the fire still burning in her eyes in contrast to how hopeless the other two looked. She tapped a button on the nearest keyboard, stared blankly at the screen. "Back trace the signal of the gas canister. Something."_

_"_ _We can't back trace the signal until Caitlin activates it," Cisco said dully. "That was the whole point."_

_"_ _Okay," Iris said. "What about…" She tapped a few more keys, but her sentence went unfinished. There was no way to end it._

_At that moment, there was a bang. Into the room burst a rush of gleaming red, a flicker of yellow. The speeding figure stumbled, faltered._

_"_ _Barry!" Joe said, least injured and therefore the first to reach the fallen man as he collapsed._

_"_ _P-p-paralytic," Barry said, gasping. "C-can't fight it much longer."_

_Joe understood immediately and propped his son up against the wall in a sitting position, sensing weakness. Barry shuddered, and so did the others as they drew closer. The speedster was a sorry sight, bleeding from the dozens of cuts on his body made by the barbed net, hair staticky from whatever electrical treatments Eiling's scientists had been giving him, muscles visibly seizing with every movement. Being among friends again did not seem to ease any of his anxiety, and the reason was obvious._

_"_ _Where's Caitlin?" Cisco said quietly, fearfully, as Joe and Iris frantically tried to staunch some of Barry's bleeding. "Where's Canton?"_

_Barry's head moved side to side jerkily, his movements stilted, his eyes wild. "Canton sh-shot," he said. At Cisco's sharp intake of breath, Barry added, "Ran her straight to a hospital. B-but I don't think I c-can run anymore."_

_In Caitlin's professional, medical opinion, Barry was displaying all of the symptoms of shock. Joe and Iris seemed to realize it, too, and they shared a worried glance._

_"_ _And Caitlin?" Cisco persisted. Everything was growing darker. His eyes were mere shadows now._

_Barry looked at him. A single bead of sweat, clear as crystal, trickled down the side of the speedster's nose. The moment of silence gained solidity between them._

_Then, Barry took a breath and responded: "Eiling still has her."_

_It wasn't sweat on his face. It was a tear, and they kept coming. Cisco fell back on his haunches as if he'd been slapped._

_Stinging water filled the room, and Caitlin was flushed out. She was jolted, gasping, back to the present, like waking from a half-dream by the sensation of falling. The blue and black was gone from her eyelids. The cell was empty._

Just a dream _, she thought._ Just a dream _._

_Still, she blinked hard a few times before closing her eyes again, hoping the gray cell walls would dissipate and be replaced—and, when they didn't, she resigned herself to reconciling the curve of her spine with the bleak, concrete reality below her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you want to continue Suffering with me, I'll be posting updates on Wednesdays and Sundays as usual. Comments make the world go round.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update. I know I usually post on Wednesdays, but after the election, I didn't have the stomach. I still don't have the stomach. But maybe some of you could use a distraction, like me.
> 
> An additional warning for this chapter: there is a brief suggestion of potential sexual harrassmentt. The act is never carried through, though, as the perpetrator is shortly killed.
> 
> That should be all. Enjoy.

_Caitlin had been expecting a loud wake-up call, a barrage of soldiers invading her cell with all of the instruments necessary for torture, or tests—which were beginning to feel like one and the same. She'd fallen into uneasy sleep with the prospect of more pain fringing her dreams, which were few and far between as they came._

_So when she woke from something resembling rest without clamor and hands and pointed guns, she was puzzled. How long had she been asleep? A few hours? Surely that was enough time for them to re-organize and prep for their next move._

_Then again, perhaps Caitlin shouldn't have been complaining about the delay at all. With any luck, all of their lab results and samples were damaged in the explosion. Maybe they'd have to start from scratch. Maybe it would buy Caitlin a little more time to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do._

_It was only when she lifted herself to a sitting position that she realized that someone had visited her when she was sleeping. And they had brought a gift._

_She began dry-heaving immediately, but she had nothing in her stomach to release. The tears came instead, thick and fast and finally hot against her skin. In front of her, the frozen body of the scientist she had killed lay unblinking._

_She cried, and cried, and cried, until the walls became fuzzy and her consciousness dimmed out._

_After another day with no interruption, the absence of any human contact became more disturbing. Of course, there was no way to actually keep track of the hours, but she estimated by the time she found herself drifting into sleep again. Dreamlessness was welcome. And, again, she felt rested when she woke up, as if she'd slept most of a night._

_It was troubling, to say the least. And, as the day went on, it became more dire._

_The thirst began as an inconvenience, a side-effect of what the smoke had done to her vocal chords. Then, as her mouth and throat became drier, simple tasks turned painful. Swallowing became excruciating. Breathing became agonizing. Moving became unbearable. She'd studied medicine enough to know the stages of dehydration—and even though she was in relatively good condition, with no weather variables and no opportunities for physical exertion, she was aware that she didn't have long before her body broke down entirely._

_When the act of standing up made her too dizzy to function, she resigned herself to sitting in the corner again, blinking against a throbbing headache. She could only stare at gray walls so much, and she found herself more and more looking at the man in ice. The man with the lab coat and the blonde hair. The man she had killed._

_She wondered what his name had been._

* * *

Lights flickered low and dark. A bulb in a streetlamp flared, died, a life snuffed out in the heat of battle. Blaze of glory. Freeze of death.

Frost had found that extinguishing particularly fascinating—a long forgotten curiosity in the makeup of things, building blocks, how systems were put together and taken apart. She'd once only been concerned with keeping those systems in place, intact. But that was before she'd experienced the methodical, deliberate taking apart.

Now she could feel her ice working through people's bodies, seeking out weak spots; she'd never anticipated that her powers would be as intimate as they were. Pluck a nerve there, pain. Freeze an artery there, death within minutes, seconds. Or she could fill them entirely with frost, reach into their bloodstream with icy fingers, pry apart their life systems until they dropped.

Frost rounded into another alley, closer now, getting closer—she was in range of the city center now, but she didn't want to go there, not yet. These alleys stank of trash and sweat and human decline. She thought she did, _should_ smell like that as well, but then, she wasn't human, was she?

"Hey."

Frost's boot landed in a puddle, and the water froze upon impact. She turned languidly toward the voice. A man, of course. He looked like the rest. He came from around a dumpster, but he was not dirty or rundown. Just waiting.

"Sick hair," he said, nodding at the white bob that framed her face. "Now what's a pretty lady like yourself doing alone in alleys at this time of night?"

"Trying to get somewhere," Frost said bluntly.

"Always tryin' to get somewhere," the man said. "Never thinkin' about those who want them to stay." He moved closer. "How about you and me have a little fun?"

"Don't have the time," Frost said.

But her path was blocked by the man, who was twice her size and nearly half the width of the alley itself. He crowded her against one of the alley walls. "No, I insist."

 _Stop_.

A ringing started in her ears, a familiar, shrill sound, almost painful.

Well, it wasn't her plan, but he would do in a pinch.

His breath was hot on her cheek. His hands found the collar of her uniform, the top button. "What is this, military? You like to play army girl?"

"Something like that," Frost breathed. "What kind of fun are you talking?"

The man chuckled softly, leaned so close that she could see the thin gold line that zig-zagged outward from his pupil, like a lightning bolt. For an instant, the image made her stiffen, heart skipping inexplicably.

Then, the man brought her back: "Any kind of fun you want, baby."

Frost re-solidified, smiled. "Good," she said, and she grabbed him by the shirt and kissed him.

* * *

_Clawing her way out of sleep was agonizing and confusing. Instead of throbbing with her heartbeat, her head was now a continuous ache, like it was stuffed too full with cotton and left to dry. Her stomach cramped as well, something between a hunger pang and menstrual pain._

_When she managed to open her eyes, everything was unfocused. Where was she? She lay there for a while, wondering, before she remembered the gray walls and the frozen corpse in the corner. There was something else in the room now, too, something that must have been put there while she slept. She squinted at it a moment before realizing that it was a water bottle._

_She didn't care if it was drugged. There was no way she could be in any more pain than she was. She was, however, still mindful of how fast she drank it. Two to three days without food or water, by her estimation, and large quantities of liquid was likely to make her vomit—and that wouldn't solve anything. She was nothing if she lost the part of her that had studied biology for years. She had to stay sane and level, even if her body's needs threatened to drive out her trained logic._

_Caitlin sipped on water as slowly as she could make herself and tried to keep her mind focused through the haze._

Okay _, she thought._ Clearly they want me alive, but weak _. She snorted bitterly to herself._ Well, it's working.

_But what were they waiting for?_

_The answer came days later, or so it felt—she'd long since lost the ability to keep track of minutes and hours—when her cell door slammed open and two pairs of gloved hands lifted her up._

_"Need water," she tried to say. "Need water." But she could hardly lift her head, let alone get anything more than a groan out of her throat._

_She was tossed onto another hard floor, but this one was metal-hard, not cement-hard. A door shut. More darkness._

_Even in the cement cell, she'd never been in complete darkness; a single, square light on the ceiling had provided a constant blueish murk. Enough light that she could see the frozen body, she supposed. For this reason, the newfound darkness wasn't unwelcome, but she wasn't lucid enough to care much one way or the other. She closed her eyes and curled up on her side, trying to move as little as possible._

_However, even that became impossible when the floor jerked beneath her and a familiar sense of momentum turned her stomach. A van, then. She was in a van. She was in a van, outside of the facility, being taken somewhere else._

Don't let them take you to a second location _, she'd always been taught._

Doesn't really matter now, _she countered, and tried again to drift into sleep._

_It must have worked, because the next thing she knew, she was being half-dragged down a passageway that could've been from the facility she'd just come from, save for the peeling green walls. The place looked just as rundown as the last and felt just as cold, now that the effects from the serum had dissipated from her body._

_In a few more turns, they arrived at a room slightly bigger than her last, with chipped green tile floors and creeping black spots in the crevices of the walls. A stiff-backed chair sat in the center of the room, facing the wall opposite the door. When Caitlin was shoved down into the chair, she realized that what she'd taken for a thin black stripe of paint on the wall was actually a window looking into a darkened room. Or a window looking into her room._

_Straps tightened around her wrists, arms, ribs, and ankles. Someone grabbed her arm, her dry, pinched arm, and slid a needle into it. The change was immediate: while the serum didn't give her back any of her physical strength, any of the hydration she so desperately needed, it connected her again to a current of power beneath her skin. It pulsed sluggishly, not as vibrant or violent as it had once been, but ready to be tapped. Caitlin's head cleared somewhat, but only enough to comprehend that she was being abandoned again, and that something about that was unsettling._

_Just before the last scientist departed, he set up two small square tables, more like pedestals, a few feet in front of Caitlin and the same distance apart. On each pedestal, he placed a clear, full glass of water._

_As soon as the door closed behind him, leaving Caitlin alone, a light flicked on in the room behind the window. Three people in white coats filed in, followed by the army green of Eiling himself. When Eiling spoke, his voice came through crackling speakers that Caitlin couldn't see._

_"Afternoon," he said. "How are you settling in?"_

_It took all of Caitlin's effort to keep her head lifted, but none at all to remain silent. She'd long since decided she wouldn't give Eiling the satisfaction of humoring him by speaking._

_"Good," Eiling said with his trademarked smirk. "We'll get straight to the point. You should be feeling a slight tingle. That's your powers coming back into your bloodstream. Feel familiar?" When she didn't respond, he continued, "How about this question: are you thirsty?"_

_Caitlin's eyes flicked to one of the glasses of water. Just seeing the sparkling liquid was enough to sharpen her already razor-edged thirst. As subtly as she could, so as not to draw attention, she strained up at the strap around her wrist. Even without her weakened state she knew it would be impossible to break through._

_"You don't have to answer that, either," Eiling said. "Just consider a proposition. You want that water. You can have it." He waited for her to question him. "I'll let you have it. All you have to do is freeze one glass. Freeze one glass of water, and you get to drink the other. Simple, ain't it?"_

_This puzzled Caitlin, but she glared through the window at him instead of enquiring. "You obviously want me alive," she rasped. "You'll give that water to me eventually. You think you'll trick me into using my powers, but it won't work."_

_"Does it sound like I'm tricking you?" Eiling said. "You're overestimating your importance to me. I don't have any use for an asset without the will to live. This is completely up to you. Freeze that water or die of thirst, I don't care."_

_"I don't either," Caitlin said, and she curled her hand around the edge of her armrest. "I'm not going to use my powers for you. I've told you that."_

_Eiling cleared his throat. "Fine. Suit yourself. I'm a patient man."_

* * *

The deeper she kissed him, the deeper she could reach with her knifelike fingers of ice—it was always more satisfying when she could rip away life closer to its source, just as it was more satisfying ripping out a hair by the root.

This time it was him trying to resist, trying to pull away, his hands clawing at her sleeves, body jerking, but it was too late for him, and had been since the moment he'd cornered her. Her powers were intimate in more ways than one, and she pressed ever closer.

Now she was fully part of the ice, part of the frost. While they shared the same mind, her and her powers, she let the ice take control, for a time, and basked in its chill. She felt the heat in the man's blood succumb, traced the inside of a rib bone, tickled the lining of one of his lungs. Then she let the ice pinch around the throbbing heart and, just like that, he was dead.

He sagged, more than half of his body frozen solid, but she caught him before he could hit the ground and dragged him the rest of the way out of the alley. The main street wasn't nearly as busy as one of the city streets, but she'd heard one or two cars pass. It would do.

She flung the body into the street and turned back to one of the building fronts, ten or twelve stories high. With the corpse at her back, she lifted her hand toward the highest part of the building, released a stream of energy, and began carving letters into the building with ice.

* * *

_"I knew you'd come around."_

_Eiling picked up the frozen glass of water and observed it like it was a piece of fine art. Two scientists with special gloves, no doubt to serve as protection against her powers, released the straps from her body methodically. The powers were still in her system, sure, but much weaker._

_She had lasted a few more hours in that chair, then. Last time she'd been injected, the powers had been in her bloodstream for a few hours, by her estimation. She'd held on as long as she could, willing herself not to be swayed by the glass of water just out of reach._

You're better than this, damnit _, she'd told herself._ You're better than them.

 _Then, as the time thinned and the agony of thirst redoubled, she had conceded,_ How much does a little glass of water actually mean?

_Eiling held up the frozen glass now and lifted the clear one in his other hand so the scientists could remove the pedestals from the room. They pitched Caitlin out of the chair so they could remove that as well. She lay there trembling, too weak to hold herself up. Eiling made a move to follow the scientists out, but Caitlin made a weak noise of protest._

_"Wait," she said. "You said…I could have the water."_

_Eiling paused, considering. "That I did." He thought about it a moment more. Then, to Caitlin's dismay, he tipped the glass sideways. The water splashed against the tile in a long stream, pooling in the cracks. Caitlin pulled herself toward the puddle, not even caring that Eiling was halfway out the door. "Maybe if you do it for me tomorrow, I'll let you have the glass, too."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Keep yourselves safe, and be kind to one another.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! We got through the week, and that's something to celebrate. You also made it through the last chapter. It's probably one of the darker chapters in the fic, so it's cool that some of you are still on board. As always, I get nervous about these things.
> 
> This chapter is actually fairly tame, psychological more than anything, so I think we're okay on warnings.
> 
> Enjoy!

It's just water, it's just water, _Caitlin kept telling herself, and the more she repeated it, the more she was convinced the phrase was what would keep her alive._

_Eiling had kept his promise of letting her drink from the glass the next time he set her up in the chair and made her freeze something. Of course, he hadn't actually allowed her to hold the glass herself, for fear she might try to hurt herself or others with the object, but still, being force-fed water was better than no water at all._

_They'd taken to feeding her again, too, with a slightly bruised apple to break her days-long period of starvation, and lumpy, tasteless, high-calorie granola bars after that. For a time she'd considered not eating, letting herself starve, but her pain levels, plus the chance of rescue she still clutched, compelled her to eat one of the disgusting bars whenever they came._

_The tests, too, grew more varied. "Freeze this and we'll let you drink" turned into "Freeze this and you'll get an apple." "Freeze this and you'll get a new gown." Not necessities. But comforts. If she ever hesitated to freeze the object, they would wait, wait until they got a result, no matter how long that took. She knew this because she'd tried to deny a banana, once, figuring if she sat there without giving in for the few hours it would take for her powers to wear off, they would let her go for another night. She was wrong. When her powers faded, the scientists came in with a new syringe, and after a few more minutes of that batch, Caitlin frustratedly gave in and froze the glass._

_After a particularly long session in which she'd held her ground against a stale piece of bread, Caitlin stretched out on the tile floor and stared up at a moldy spot in the corner of the ceiling. She grew bored of that, and rolled to her side—she'd never stopped suspecting that she was being watched at all times, so she put her back to the window as much as she could. Her cheek met the tile, and that's when it happened again:_

_Blue, black, white, flicker._

_This time she identified it as a vibe more quickly, not because she'd experienced vibes herself, but because of how detailed Cisco's descriptions had been._ Cisco _. The name already felt somewhat foreign on her tongue, out of place in this reality._

_But there he was, his face in front of her, his eyes again fixed directly on her. She'd been thinking a lot about the first time this had happened, in all of her quiet moments alone. She'd wondered how to get back, how to respond to this fragment of a vibe that Cisco was somehow sending out. But, like a message in a bottle, she could only look, not respond._

_"_ _Still not working?" Barry swam into focus next to Cisco._

_"_ _Maybe it would if you'd stop interrupting my mojo," Cisco said. He broke Caitlin's gaze. "But no. I still can't reach her. I don't know what's blocking me."_

_"_ _Could be something of Eiling's," Barry said._

_Cisco scoffed. "Yeah, like he's that smart."_

_All in all, he looked remarkably better than the last time Caitlin had seen him, and sounded more like himself, too. He was still shadowed with worry, as was Barry, but the sight of them both at least physically recovered was enough to provide Caitlin some relief._

_"_ _Did you say you still can't reach her?" Iris appeared behind the boys, arms crossed, face filled with such fretfulness as Caitlin had never seen in her before. It was as if anxiety had sunk into the lines of her face long ago like sand, and had thus solidified there over time. The worry-lines appeared immovable._

_"_ _Nothing," Cisco said with a quick tap to his temple. "The only thing I haven't tried is turning it off and back on again, but I would consider that a last resort."_

_Iris was unfazed by the jape. "Barry?"_

_Barry shook his head. "There's nothing there. The place is empty. Eiling and his team must have relocated."_

_"_ _With Caitlin," Iris said, sinking into a chair like her legs could no longer support her._

_"_ _I still think it was a bad idea to go there without backup," Cisco said bitterly._

_"_ _I had backup," Barry said. "You were here on the comms. On the computers."_

_"_ _Yeah, hello? Superpowers?" Cisco again wiggled his fingers at the side of his head._

_"_ _Fat lot of good it would've done if_ both _of us were captured again," Barry retorted._

_"_ _Caitlin needs you to be level-headed. You can't keep running off, being all rash and heroic, you're going to get yourself—"_

_"_ _What if they keep moving?" Iris said in a blind attempt to stop the fight, get them back on track._

_This, at least, seemed to refocus them. Barry's face softened. "We'll get Caitlin back," he said. "We will."_

_"_ _But what if they_ keep moving _?" Iris repeated._

_Cisco offered a hand on her shoulder, set his features. "Then we'll keep chasing."_

_Then the vibe fizzed out._

_Caitlin woke the following morning after the vibe with a renewed sense of determination, of hope. With the knowledge that the STAR Labs team was still looking for her, she experienced a calm unlike anything she'd managed during her stint there. When the scientists arrived and Eiling offered her a shower for her efforts, she iced the glass of water without resistance. It was the shortest session yet, and ice was still pulsing through her when a swath of soldiers hauled her out of the room and into a tiny, tiny room with nothing but a showerhead._

_Once the door was shut, whoever was controlling the water turned it on without warning. The first shock of water surprised her, but she wasted no time in pulling off her flimsy gown and cupping her hands beneath the stream. Once she had drunk her fill, she began her hurried wash. There was no telling how much time she would be allowed, so she would have to make the most of it._

_The water was probably cold, but for the first time she didn't mind her powers—the chill had no effect on her. She ducked her head under the water, hoping to at least get some of the oil out of her hair without the help of shampoo. Once her hair was soaked, she let the water strip away some of the grime and sweat that had built up on her skin over however many days she'd been held there._

_And, with the water drowning out the rest of the world, she smiled a fragment of a smile._

_The team was going to find her._

_She was surviving. Hungry, weak, exhausted, but alive. If she just played along for a few more days, kept things easy—hell, here she was, given a private shower of all things—the team would find her and she'd go home. It wouldn't be normal, not for a while, but she had bounced back from worse. If her friends weren't giving up, then neither could she._

_The water shut off abruptly. Caitlin hastily covered herself with the now sopping-wet gown she'd stuffed in the corner of the shower, but there was no need. The door opened and someone thrust in a clean, dry gown, made of thicker stuff than before, and she pulled it over her head without question._

_She swallowed back the usual fear as the horde of guards ushered her back down the hallway, her long hair dripping. She had to stay strong, stay brave._

_"_ _I don't suppose I could get a hairbrush?" she managed. It didn't sound as cocky as she'd hoped, but it was something. More words than she'd ever spoken directly to the soldiers, anyway._

_They ignored her, of course, and kept marching. The water had renewed Caitlin, given her a bit more solidity in her step, and even though the soldiers kept their hands on her arms, she walked of her own volition. She would not be dragged anymore, she decided. She had found some semblance of control, in her own personal way, and she held to that like it was a lifeline. Which, in a way, it was._

_To her surprise, the chair was still set up in her room, though the room beyond was empty. The soldiers strapped her in as usual, made sure the bindings were secure. Her eyes flicked from one soldier to the next, watching, wondering what they'd been paid to agree to any of this, wondering if she could talk to any of them privately to make her case._

_Soon, though, all of the soldiers filed away, and the door closed. Her heart thumped. Whenever she'd been left alone, it was without the chair, without the restraints. She'd never been forced to sit the hours of waiting in the hard metal seat; she'd always had the freedom to stretch out on the floor, at least. A thought, disturbing, crept to mind: what if they left her like this for days? Her back was already cramped and wrists chafed from the hours of silent protest in the seat, and she couldn't imagine being stuck there, motionless, alone, for longer._

_However, just as this thought niggled her, the door opened again, a loud groan of metal. Then silence._

_Caitlin waited, her heartbeat gaining rhythm. After what felt like ages of quiet, she said, "Who's there?"_

_The footsteps started._

_The disadvantage of facing the wall opposite the door was that she couldn't see who was entering the room—which, she realized now, was probably the whole point. She craned her neck as much as she could to try and see who was pacing behind her, but the exercise was futile in the stiff chair. The prickling anxiety spread over her skin as goosebumps._ I'm not scared of you, _she wanted to say, but couldn't._

_Without warning, a hand grasped her hair near the scalp and pulled backward. The pain of it was almost matched by that of her heart, leaping with fright and darkness and surprise and beating in fiery agitation. In her periphery, a knife glinted bright._

_The sound of the knife shearing through her hair was like ripping, the tearing of so many threads, a forcible unraveling._

* * *

The world steamed. Frost stepped back to admire her work. The ice retreated from the tips of her fingers, the bright blue fading to the natural pale white of her skin. She'd never done anything like this—her powers were usually used for destruction, not for this level of creation—but she had to admit that she admired the showmanship of it all. It wasn't her idea, of course. Eiling had given her specific instructions. But that didn't make it any less spectacular.

Eiling always smirked when he was satisfied with something he'd created, accomplished. He'd been smirking a lot lately, and the image was fresh. Looking up at her work, the completion of one of Eiling's instructions and a beautiful display of her power, she thought she should feel the same. But the smile didn't come to her face naturally, and she was too tired to make the effort.

While her eyes tracked the glitter of ice and her hair rippled with wind too cold for her to feel, the real world continued to roll into place. A heel clicked on pavement. A woman screamed.

Frost pivoted slowly, back toward the street. The body of the man lay tangled and askew on the pavement. A woman in a business suit, clutching a briefcase to her chest, stood on the opposite sidewalk. She and Frost stared at each other across the street, a body between them, the expanse washed with gray dusk. From this distance, Frost could just see the fear lines on her face and the billows of hot, fast breath dissipating in the air.

It was cold outside, then.

"Scream again," Frost said.

The woman whimpered. A car screeched to a halt somewhere just beyond the scene, shouts announcing the arrival of more witnesses. Frost watched the woman a few more moments curiously. The woman, for what it was worth, never broke eye contact. Perhaps she was afraid that Frost would kill her, too. Perhaps it was a logical assumption.

"Call for your hero," Frost said, ignoring the yells of the new arrivals, her voice low and harsh. "Tell him Killer Frost has arrived."

She strode away before the screaming drew more attention, fixed back on her ultimate destination. Behind her, the single word that she'd carved into the building shimmered with frost, high enough to be seen across the city, like a beacon:

 _Flash_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoorah, thanks for reading! My review box is always open :)
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't tell anymore if you're talking about this fic or the show when you say "I can't wait to see Killer Frost and the Flash fight."
> 
> Additional warnings for the chapter: Y'all. We're moving out of strictly psychological torture and into actual physical pain. Specifically, electrocution, and lots of it, for the next couple of chapters. Please keep yourselves safe.
> 
> Enjoy!

_Caitlin sat shaky in her chair. She could feel the loss of her hair, even if she couldn't see it; the damp, ragged ends brushed her throat, as short and sloppy as the time she'd tried to give herself her own haircut in the fourth grade. The room was cold now, inducing shivers of more than one sort. The serum had run its course. A deep instability took its place._

_After the stranger had sliced off her hair, the door had shut. She'd never even seen their face. Somehow, that made it worse. The simple act of cutting her hair shouldn't have been this unsettling, she tried to tell herself. It was just hair. The act itself hadn't been painful, just a nasty jolt._

_But it was the lack of control. The blind shock. The feeling of somehow, deeper, being less human. She visibly quaked, and for the first time since she'd arrived, she actively hoped that Eiling wasn't watching her distress. Her irrational distress._

_When the door opened again, she nearly jumped out of her skin. She again craned her neck as far as possible to see the new arrivals, but the scientists passed her by without a thought. A light flicked on in the observation room._

_"I like the new look," Eiling said from behind the glass. "It suits you."_

_"I don't know what kind of sick game you're playing," Caitlin said, "but I'm not falling for it."_

_"Oh, there's nothing to 'fall for,'" Eiling said with an air of mock confusion. "Trust me, you're doing just fine. Although it did take a while for you to_ warm up _, you are progressing much faster than we ever could have anticipated. We're graduating you to the next level."_

_From behind Caitlin, again, someone approached. Before Caitlin could react, a new leather strap was fixed around her forehead, pulling her head tight against the backboard of the chair. Her pulse picked up just as she saw the device that was being wheeled in._

_"Don't be afraid," Eiling said. "This only has to be as painful as you make it."_

_It was the machine she'd once killed to shut off, the machine that had been used on Barry when she'd found him. Its former operator was dead now, frozen solid. She remembered how Barry had screamed, convulsed. She felt a low whimper build in her throat._

_"The deal is very similar to what you already know," Eiling said, as a scientist administered the usual serum injection and another attached two electrodes to her temples. "Freeze the glass of water, and we'll end the session."_

_The glass of water in question was placed on its usual pedestal. All but one scientist filtered out of the room. The one remaining shoved something rubber between Caitlin's teeth, but she spat it out as her anxiety heightened to uncontrollable levels._

_"Th-this isn't right," she said, trying to catch Eiling's eye through the glass, aware that her own were likely wide as dinner plates. "You can't do this, I'm—"_

_The machine fired with a high-pitched_ beep.

 _Blind. She was blind, she was dead, she was dying. The world no longer mattered. She wanted out. She wanted out, out,_ out, stop, please—

_When she came to her senses, there was blood on her tongue. She wasn't sure why, at first. She gagged on it, spattering it down the front of her shirt. No, her gown. Her hospital gown. She blinked confusedly._

_"That was just a little taste," came a voice. "A few seconds is enough to drive you crazy, innit?"_

_Her tongue. She'd bitten her tongue, and hard. The blood kept filling her mouth, and she worked to cough it out. She saw now why the rubber mouthpiece had been necessary. She'd studied this stuff, damnit, she should've known better than to spit it out, even in her panic._

_"Like I said, this can go as long or as quickly as you'd like," Eiling continued. "We'll stop as soon as you freeze that little glass for us."_

_She wanted to, so badly, almost unbearably so._ What does it matter? _she thought. The pain was what was unbearable. A few seconds, Eiling had said, but it had felt like hours. Usually people were given anesthesia for these types of procedures, knocked out—but then, why would she ever suspect that Eiling would be ethical?_

_"Why?" she managed, barely audible. More blood bubbled down to her chin._

_"Because I believe you are just like ice, Dr. Snow," Eiling said. "You will break before you bend."_

_He nodded at the scientist in the room. Caitlin didn't have time to think, to protest, before he flicked a switch again._ Beep. _Her world was again wrenched into blinding white agony, but only for a moment. The pain transformed, blossomed, exploded. The white light dimmed, and for a moment Caitlin prayed that she was passing out. However, the light flashed blue before deepening to black, and her eyes were open, and she was blinking into a vibe once again._

* * *

The sirens were loud enough to hear five, six, seven blocks away. Frost found it funny, in a way, that Central City still had use for such things. The city had a speedster at its beck and call. If he applied himself, he could permanently erase the need for police, firemen, and EMTs. He was faster than all of their vehicles. He could take down petty criminals without so much as blinking. He could put out fires in seconds with only his arms.

If he wanted to, he could singlehandedly protect the entire city. And yet the sirens were still necessary.

 _Weak_ , she thought. Wasn't that the word for people who didn't properly utilize the powers they were given?

Tonight, the sirens were probably unnecessary, anyway. By now, likely, the Flash was already speeding off toward the scene of the crime. Having one's name carved into the side of a building was like to do that to a person.

There wasn't anything he could do, though. The man in the street was dead, frozen from the inside out. And if the Flash wanted to comb the streets looking for her, he would be too late.

She'd reached her destination. And STAR Labs was more dazzling than she ever could have imagined.

* * *

_"It's not going to work, Cisco—damnit, ow!"_

_"Sorry," Iris said, pulling her hands away from Barry's arm like she'd been stung. "I think it's broken."_

_"Cisco."_

_Cisco turned toward Barry and Iris finally. "What?"_

_"You've got to stop beating yourself up, man" Barry said. "It's been weeks. The vibing is not working."_

_"Beating myself up?" Cisco snapped. "What do you call this?" He motioned at Barry, sitting on the cot, dirty and cradling the limp arm._

_"I call it being productive," Barry said. "Doing my job."_

_"We talked about taking unnecessary risks," Cisco said. "We agreed that you would take me with you, help you out in the field."_

_"Barry, we should really get you to an actual doctor," Iris interjected._

_"Taking unnecessary risks?" Barry continued. "My life is about taking risks. Taking risks is the only thing that's going to work."_

_"And persistence," Cisco said. "Which is why I can't afford to stop trying, stop vibing."_

_"Ow!" Barry shouted again as Iris attempted to peel back the sleeve of his suit. "And I don't need a real doctor. I can heal on my own."_

_"You can't heal a broken arm correctly on your own," Iris said. "I don't know how to set it, so I think—"_

_"It's fine," Barry said, shrugging away, wincing as he did._

_Iris softened. "Barry. You don't have to punish yourself for what happened." She reached out, tentatively placing her hand on his leg. "You are not to blame for Caitlin."_

_"It's not just that," Barry said. "It's Rose."_

_Cisco crossed his arms. "Eiling shot Rose because Caitlin wouldn't kill him."_

_"But if I would've been faster…"_

_"It wouldn't have made any difference," Cisco said. "Rose's death is not your fault."_

_A snap of frustration, anxiety, desperation._

_"It's…" Cisco paused again. "Well, it's not on you."_

_The vibe dissipated, and Caitlin blinked back to the present. The pain of electrocution was gone. It was supplemented now by a deep throb behind her eyes, a realization so devastating she felt as if she was being numbed from the inside out, all internal systems shutting down one by one._

_When she finally managed to lift her teary eyes back up to Eiling, he was looking at her curiously._

_"Again," he instructed._

_No respite. Caitlin convulsed, the razor edge of lightning tearing through her, and even when it stopped she felt her fingers twitching. Again, she could not place her surroundings instantly upon regaining awareness, but she felt debilitated, pain of many sorts as intrinsically part of her body as her own blood._

_"Stop," she said, fumbling for language between the blood and the haze and the fire. "Please, stop."_

_"Make me," Eiling said._

_Painfully, wearily, Caitlin lifted her fingers. A stream of ice erupted. The glass of water cracked as it froze._

_When the straps were loosened, when the chair and the water were removed and she was left alone, she trembled uncontrollably. The coppery taste of blood stung her, trickled down her throat, and she retched. Hurts from the electrical treatment raged in full, too, in her head, her neck, her ribs._

_More than that, though, was the repetition that scalded deeper than any physical wound:_ Rose is dead. Rose is dead.

_Cisco himself had said it: Rose had been shot because of Caitlin, because Caitlin had been unwilling, scared of using her powers. Cisco had cut himself off before saying it, but the implication was obvious. Rose was dead because of her. And the whole team knew it._

_Two murders. The scientist who had been torturing Barry, and now Rose Canton._

Having powers does not make you evil, _she'd once told Canton, long ago, centuries ago, sitting opposite Canton's pipeline cell._

_Caitlin didn't have the energy, or the stamina, to cry. She simply curled in on her trembling self, feeling the pulse of energy under her skin, and stared at the black mold creeping from the corners of the room._

* * *

If there was one thing STAR had always lacked, it was security. Frost recalled that much—or perhaps it was something Eiling had told her. Either way, it appeared that the people who worked there had learned their lesson. As soon as Frost burst through the doors without using the designated key code, alarms started blaring, red lights crisscrossing the hallway beyond.

She paid the sirens no heed as she prowled down the hallway, even if the familiar high-pitched ringing drove her steps a bit quicker. This was nothing new. The ringing, the sirens, the pain—it would all end soon. The further she got down the STAR hallway, the worse it all became. She'd never relished in her missions, not like Eiling did, but this one felt different. For whatever reason, now more than ever, all she wanted was to be done and to go back.

Surprisingly, she met no resistance down her prescribed path. Aside from the obvious alarms, the place was, figuratively, quiet. While STAR appeared to have upgraded security measures, they apparently hadn't hired anyone new. The building was literally defenseless. It would be too easy.

Frost followed the mental map Eiling had drilled into her brain around a few more bends, up a flight of stairs. All the while the clouds of cold grew larger around her hands, trailing fog.

Then she was finally there, in the place Eiling had described as the heart of the building— _cortex? why was she thinking cortex?_ —and she took stock of the wide circular room. The fluorescents were on in full, counteracted by the flashing reds of the alarm, and computer screens throughout the room glowed with activity. One in particular shoved a detailed map of the Flash's suit, stats and controls and monitors stretched across three computer displays.

Frost studied them carefully, watching the beat of his heart, listening to his measured breath through the comms. She muted the comms first, in both directions. She didn't want to hear him, and she sure as hell didn't want him to hear her, not yet. Then she skimmed through some of the suit controls.

The suit had been installed with a plethora of functions, some more intelligible than the others. Heat and coolant piping in the seams. Dissolving anti-stick pockets in the boots. Defibrillator in the chest logo.

The ringing intensified in her ears, but she forced a smile. Defibrillator in the suit. That would slow him down nicely. She pictured the spikes of electricity, the seizing muscles, the blood and the tears and the pain, hideous pain from the knives too deep to tear out…

She gasped and clutched at a chair for support, unexpectedly weak, and felt the chair turn cold beneath her unbridled touch. The ringing grew shrill. Doggedly, she reached for the computer and fumbled with the controls for the defibrillator. The first thing she did was dial down the charge—she didn't want to send him into cardiac arrest, just give him a painful shock that would hopefully debilitate him for a few minutes while she could compete the rest of the plan.

Her hand hovered over the button to execute the command, but something stopped her. The prickling of hairs on the back of her neck. The feeling of being watched. The presence of another entity in the room, so quiet they might have been a ghost.

Frost turned to face the intruder— _no,_ she _was the intruder, she was here for her mission_ —and planted her feet, ice already gathering at her fingertips again.

The woman at the door blanched. She brandished a gun, but it lowered incrementally at the sight of Frost. The woman's voice was cracked, stunned, disbelieving as she said:

"Caitlin?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I look forward to hearing your thoughts and your rambles. See you Sunday.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: just...lots of torture via electrocution, with brief reference to ECT treatments. Canon-typical violence, plus semi-offscreen minor character death.
> 
> Enjoy!

"Caitlin?"

Frost scowled, watched the gun slip further down in the woman's grasp. The woman looked so weak it wouldn't have been surprising if it fell completely from her hands. Frost's fingers twitched.

"It's Frost," she said. "Killer Frost." She cocked her head. "You're the reporter. You're West."

West swallowed, hard. "Cait, it's Iris. How did—how did you escape?"

"I didn't need to escape," Frost spat. "I was looking for you, actually. How convenient."

West was foolish, frail, just as Eiling had always said; Frost could see it in her eyes, in the way she lowered the gun completely and began a hesitant walk forward. "It's been three months," she choked. " _Months_. What has Eiling…what did he…"

Something streaked down her cheek. It took a moment for Frost to identify it as a tear. She didn't remember crying much—tears froze on her cheeks, and she'd often been reminded that the exercise was futile, anyway.

"Are you crying?" she asked rather pointlessly, inflecting a sneer into her voice.

"We thought you were…you were dead, or…" West stopped a few feet away. "Cait, what did he do to you?"

"He made me strong," Frost said. "But I'm not Caitlin."

She lifted her hands and shot a stream of ice at West's feet. The ground slicked. Caught unawares, West slipped, crashed to the ground. She grunted at the impact, landing hard on her elbow, the gun clattering.

Frost, satisfied, turned back to the console, continued adjusting the charge of the defibrillator.

"What are you doing?" West asked, breathless on the floor.

"Just giving our hero a bit of a shock," Frost said. "This should give him a little something to think about."

Just as she reached for the button to engage the defibrillator, the clicking of a gun's safety stopped her in her tracks.

"I can't let you do that," West said behind her.

Frost swiveled. The gun was again pointed directly at her, West's hand shaking but the aim holding true.

"Let me help you, Cait," she said. "You don't have to do this."

Frost considered this. "You won't pull the trigger," she said. "You think I'm your friend. I know your weakness: you'll never shoot me."

West breathed. Her expression told Frost that the statement was true. It was too easy. Too easy to prey on weaknesses. That weakness was STAR Labs' undoing, and Frost's shield.

Alarm lights flickered red and white against West's face. "You're right," she said finally. "I won't shoot you."

But she pulled the trigger anyway, and the bullet went flying. It soared toward the computers, toward the console, where Frost was adjusting the Flash's suit.

Frost reached out just in time, creating a wall of ice to shield the precious computers. As soon as the barrier was created, it shattered upon contact with the bullet. The shards of ice had not yet reached the floor when Frost sent another stream toward the gun, freezing it useless.

"Nice try," Frost said.

But West wasn't done. Dropping the gun, she clambered to her feet and jerked in Frost's direction. Frost hurled a ball of ice her direction, but she ducked sideways. Her tackle was effective enough: it caught Frost off guard just enough to shove her backward into the console.

But West was no metahuman. Frost felt the woman's hands on her shoulders, and she focused her energy outward from those points. West pulled backward as the cold began penetrating her skin, and Frost took advantage of the surprise to reach out.

Quick as a snake, she had one hand around West's throat, and she used her momentum to slam the other woman down onto the desk. Bent awkwardly backward, pinned to the desk by Frost's hand on her throat, West struggled wildly for breath, for purchase.

"Now, now," Frost said. "Don't struggle."

A memory, harsh and long-forgotten, screamed behind Frost's eyelids, threatening to cloud her mind and her purpose. Pain. She was here for pain.

Keeping one hand firmly planted on West's airway, Frost made a final adjustment to the defibrillator. West choked for air, clawed at Frost's hand. Frost ignored it and slammed the button to execute.

* * *

_Caitlin screamed, though she knew it was pointless to scream, even counterproductive. She didn't want Eiling to know how much he was hurting her, how much he was breaking her. But there was no way to contain the screams when the electricity ran jagged through her body. And Eiling would've known how much he was hurting her even without them._

_When she came back to herself, tears freezing on her face, she reached out and iced the glass as usual. The scientist administering the electricity stepped back, and the standard clean-up process began. She spat out the rubber mouth guard, hardly feeling when the soldiers shoved her to the floor in order to remove the chair._

_"_ _Good," Eiling said past the glass. "Good, Dr. Snow. Try to get some shut-eye. We'll see you soon."_

_Caitlin felt as though she was numb to the world, though that was hardly true—the usual aftermath pain debilitated her. Still, the sensation of the tile against her cheek didn't register, and when she managed to blink up and look around the room, she realized that the door was shut and the lights in the observation off. Eiling had just been there, hadn't he?_

_Confusion. She tried to orient herself with the facts that she thought she knew. Side effects of ECT treatments were confusion and memory loss. She was just confused. She had to remember that._

_But it was getting worse, the more frequent the sessions with Eiling became. She lay there on the floor and tried to remember how much time this session had been, how long she'd lasted, but she couldn't. How many times had she actually been electrocuted this time? Five times? Ten? Or was it just the one?_

_The fact that she couldn't remember at all should have disturbed her more, but she didn't have the energy. She closed her eyes, but the throbbing was just as bad behind her eyelids. She wasn't sure what she wanted more—to remember what had happened during the session, or to forget all of it altogether._

_She'd been getting the vibes more often now, always during the electrical treatments, always just as fleeting as the last. While she had lost all sense of time and much of her cognizance, she always remembered the vibes and what she saw in them. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism. Or perhaps it was her mind's own special way of punishing her._

_It was evident, now, that the STAR team wasn't going to find her. That much had been clear in the vibes she'd gotten the past few sessions. With each one, conversations drifted further and further from Caitlin's rescue and toward their more immediate predicaments. Metahumans of the week. Troubles at the police station. And, more and more prominently, traces of Zoom._

_"_ _Zoom is a bigger threat than ever," Caitlin remembered Barry saying in her most recent vibe. "He is our primary objective. We can't afford to think about anything else."_

_"_ _You're right," Cisco had said. And the third member of the team had nodded her agreement._

_Iris. Her name was Iris._

_Caitlin rubbed at her eyes. The exhaustion and the disorientation were getting to her._

_How long had it been since she'd been here? From the vibes, it seemed like weeks. The real question was, how often was Eiling administering the shock treatments? She'd once known the medical science behind such treatments, safe ways of administering it and the wait times between sessions. She couldn't remember any of it now._

_And, besides, this wasn't treatment at all. This was vastly different from anything she'd ever studied—she suspected it was a low voltage, just enough to cause ungodly pain without permanent damage. Short, contained bursts, rather than extended use. And something about the device administering shocks itself was unfamiliar as well, more high-tech than anything she'd seen, as though it served multiple purposes._

_What had she been trying to think of? Oh, yes, how long she'd been held captive. The original question circled back sluggishly. She couldn't think straight, and her head threatened to burst with the high-pitched ringing that had begun to accompany these sessions. How long had she been there?_

_It felt like a lifetime, and hse supposed that was all the answer she needed._

_It seemed as if she'd only blinked when the soldiers wrested her out of her stupor again. Another blink and she was in the chair, the new dose of serum making her head buzz._

_"_ _New day, new rules," Eiling's voice came crackling through to her._

_A day? When had a day passed? Had she eaten? She didn't recall doing so, but she also didn't feel hungry. Then again, she didn't feel much of anything._

_Instead of the pedestal with the water, another chair was wheeled in. A man was sitting in it, strapped in, and he looked familiar in a way that Caitlin knew she should've been able to place him._

_Eiling motioned. "Thought you might like a familiar face."_

_Caitlin frowned. The short, black hair, the handsomely-cut face, the eyes. How did she know him?_

_"_ _You're her, aren't you?" the man said, panicked. "Killer Frost? You're Killer Frost."_

_That wasn't her. She wanted to say so, but he looked at her with such fear and such certainty that it muddled her own confidence. Her name was—it was—_

_"_ _Caitlin," she said, dizzied, still trying to get a lock on the man's name. "My name is Caitlin Snow."_

_He squinted at her. It looked as though he hadn't bathed in days, weeks, maybe. Though, to be fair, Caitlin couldn't remember the last time she'd washed, either. She probably looked just as oily, sweaty, bedraggled as he did._

_"_ _Caitlin Snow," he repeated. "How…" He shook his head. "It's Rusch. Jason Rusch. I worked with Professor Stein on his Firestorm research. You and I spoke, briefly…it must have been a year ago. Jason Rusch. Do you remember me?"_

_Rusch. The name echoed of memory. Firestorm. The 800-page research paper. She remembered Rusch's skittish look, his frightened eyes. She remembered that table at Jitters, the cold night, his hushed tones:_

"So tell me, Dr. Snow. Do you think I'm being too paranoid, or not paranoid enough?"

_"_ _Mr. Rusch has been an invaluable asset in our research," Eiling's voice cut through on the speakers and snapped her back to the present. "His knowledge of Firestorm has helped us refine some of that serum pumping through your blood."_

_"_ _Dr. Snow—" Rusch was cut off as one soldier plastered duct tape across his mouth. He grunted, and Caitlin felt her heart plummet to her stomach._

_"_ _When we tested our serum on him," Eiling continued, "the results were much of what you'd expect. Not a coincidence, I think, that the developer of Firestorm research would acquire the power to produce flames. The test went swimmingly, until our Firestorm prodigy decided to use those powers in an escape attempt, damaging valuable equipment and people as he did."_

_"_ _Maybe you sh-should expect that when you unlawfully imprison p-people," Caitlin said. She'd gotten out of the habit of talking back to Eiling, lacking much of the energy for it, and this attempt was not nearly as biting as she'd planned._

_"_ _I think he needs to cool off, don't you think?" Eiling pressed on without pause. "One of his hands, how about? He only needs one of them to continue his research."_

_Rusch's eyes widened. The reality dawned on Caitlin._

_"_ _I'm not…I won't freeze his hand," she stammered. Where was the water glass, the harmless water glass? "This isn't…you can't make me do this."_

_"_ _I beg to differ."_

_She should've expected it, anticipated. The pain wrenched her out of herself, away from her memories and emotions and anything that mattered. Eiling didn't matter, Rusch didn't matter, she didn't matter, only the knives and needles and the shrill sound like a screaming kettle—_

_When she resurfaced, she was gasping. It was worse than before, she thought. More intense. Or maybe it just felt that way because of the impossible alternative in front of her._

_Rusch. She locked eyes with him again and grasped the name, willing it not to slip away. Willing it to matter._

_"_ _Just a hand," Eiling coaxed. "You've done worse,_ Killer _Frost."_

_He emphasized the first word, and Caitlin jerked. "It's torture. I'm not going to be your device for—"_

Beep.

_Blindness. Crackling. White light._

_The shrillness of it all continued even when the spell stopped. She held her ground, breathing so hard that each exhale was a wheeze._

Beep.

_She was screaming now, with each new bout, hardly able to catch her breath in the interim._

Beep _._

_She came to, sobbing, though the tears were frozen instantly. She couldn't meet Rusch's gaze, couldn't stand to see the fear, and besides, everything had gone blurry and indistinct anyway._

_"_ _Why?" she managed to cry._

_"_ _Because I ordered you to," Eiling responded._

Beep.

_But he didn't answer her question, not really. The worst sobs wrenched muscles deep in her chest, and something was stretching, snapping like a rubber band, and it was too much, too much to stay intact—_

_Because_ why _her, why her out of all people? She wasn't built for this. Barry and Cisco were metahumans, crimefighters, and they had resigned themselves to taking beatings long ago, but she…she was built for her seat behind the desk, for her support to the injured afterward. She had signed up for danger, but she had never signed up for this, not this, not excruciating pain and hospital gowns and constant observation and injections and cold tile floors—_

_"_ _I won't, I won't," she mumbled in a period of rest, partly to Eiling and partly as a command to herself._

_A shock gripped her and, finally, she passed out._

_In the vibe that replaced her total unconsciousness, she watched Cisco and Barry lean heavily against a table. Iris held up a small stack of photographs._

_"_ _Eiling just sent these," she said. "Or, rather, I found them on my doorstep."_

_She slapped the photos down on the table, and they scattered. Cisco bit his knuckles to suppress a moan, and Barry's face hardened._

_"_ _It's him," he said. "It's true."_

_"_ _This is the guy that Caitlin killed?" Iris said._

_Barry nodded. "I didn't want to believe it, but…she did kill him."_

_"_ _Him and Rose," Iris added._

_The three of them fell silent around the pictures. The images were like pieces of shattered glass, reflecting different angles of the same snapshot. A dozen different views of the frozen, dead scientist glared up accusatorily._

_"_ _Okay, as disturbing as this is, we've got to be strategic about this. If we find Caitlin, we can't…" Cisco swallowed. "We can't let her know that we think she's a murderer. You know what that would do her."_

_"_ If _we find her," Iris said, "what's to say she won't do the same to us?" And she held up a photo as proof, displaying again the vacant, lifeless eyes of the frozen man._

_A hard slap to the face brought Caitlin out of the vibe and back to consciousness. It wasn't the first time she'd passed out during a session, but she'd never been so disoriented afterward. The images of the vibe were still steeped in her subconscious, making the waking world that much more confusing._

_It couldn't have been too long that she'd been out, because Eiling and the scientists were still watching from their observation room, and Jason Rusch was still sweating and struggling in front of her._

_"_ _It would be easier for you to follow my orders," Eiling said, his voice coming through a tunnel. Caitlin felt as though she wasn't quite conscious after all, as if she could slip back at a moment's notice. Perhaps she could escape to that darkness when they next activated the electricity._

_It was a comforting thought, one that gave her some measure of strength. Just a kernel. "No," she mumbled. "I won't. I'm not your puppet. I won't."_

_She was tempted to add,_ I can do this all day _, but she wasn't sure it was true, wasn't sure she could even muster up the energy to say the words, and, besides, Eiling had already made a dismissive motion to the scientist at the machine controls._

_The man began packing up his equipment, and Caitlin fought to repress a sigh of relief. Though she hadn't managed to say the words, Eiling had gotten the message. Even with the dread in her heart, the horror of the vibe and the slicing pain in her head, she had claimed her small victory._

_Then Rusch's eyes flicked up to a point past her shoulder and his eyes grew wide. He screamed past his gag. Eiling made another motion. Just behind Caitlin, a gun_ banged _._

_It was the surprise of it, the clap of thunder at her ear and the flash of heat, that caused her to black out again._

_When she woke once more, she was sprawled on the floor of her cell, and a pool of blood lay inches from her fingertips._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #yikes! We're going there, definitely.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading, and please consider making my day by leaving a comment. I'll see you all on Wednesday (after an episode that is probably going to look pretty similar to the next chapter, lmao).
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo so how about last night's Killer Frost episode, huh? I hope you have the stamina for a bit more Team Flash in-fighting, because...this chapter is happening.
> 
> (Also, quick note, if you couldn't already tell, canon is pretty much out the window. That Zoom reference last chapter is pretty much all you're going to get. Who knows what canon is happening behind the scenes. I don't.)
> 
> Warnings: typical torture-y stuff, nothing really new.

The defibrillator activated, and the Flash's vitals tanked. Frost watched with removed satisfaction the completion of her goal, still somewhat detached from the events unfolding. West continued to struggle, nails drawing blood from the hand pinioned to her throat.

"You're…killing…him," the woman choked.

Frost tightened her grip, causing the woman to buck violently. "Save your breath," she instructed. "I'm just slowing him down, not killing him yet. No, he has to be around when I kill _you_."

She squeezed. West's eyes fluttered, her breath now completely gone.

Then something hit Frost around the middle, and she was thrust backward. She hit the table hard enough to bruise. West crumpled to the floor. Gasping, Frost swiveled toward the door.

"Caitlin. Stand down."

Frost brushed back the hair that had flown in front of her face, panting. The force that had caught her in the gut had felt as solid as a punch. "Vibe. I was wondering when I would see you."

In the doorway, Vibe stood with arms raised, clearly trembling despite the hard frown on his face. He had his hair loose around his face, his eyes wild, his bottom lip quivering. "Cait."

"I see you've refined your powers." Frost ignored the one-word statement. "The sonic blasts, I mean. If you'd refined your vibes, maybe you would've realized earlier that I was killing your friends."

"I don't want to hurt you," Vibe said.

"Funny," Frost responded. "That's exactly what your friend said before I took her down. It's your weakness, isn't it?"

But Vibe pulsed, and again a wave of energy rippled her direction. If she had been expecting it, it might have been slow enough to avoid, but it was the last thing she expected him to do. The punch of energy hit Frost harder this time, enough to send her flying. She tumbled over the edge of the desk and hit the hard floor.

"Caitlin!"

Frost picked herself up, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. The name was meant to goad her, she knew, but it only evoked a vague sense of annoyance. "Stop calling me that."

She clawed her way back up the table, and Vibe clenched his fists. "You know, someone who looked like you once said the same thing to me. But whatever Eiling did to you, Cait, you're not that person."

"Try me." Frost let the cold return to her fingertips, stepped out in the open. "Take your best shot."

But Vibe hesitated; just like West, he seemed unwilling to make a deadly move against Frost. He had that tenseness in his muscles, but his eyes betrayed him. So, instead of waiting, Frost released a stream of cold in his direction. He dove sideways to avoid it, then flung an energy blast her direction.

It was weak. She suspected it would be, and her hunch was confirmed when the blast hit her sternum and only managed to knock her back a few feet. "Come on, Vibe," she said, and shot out a hard ball of ice. Vibe ducked, and it smashed against the wall. His returning shot was more concentrated, more forceful, but she was done with games.

Her shield of ice was enough to stop the blast, and the next, and the last. By the time the most powerful blast reached her, she was close enough that her next ice ball was impossible to avoid. It caught Vibe square in the temple, and he went down hard.

"Cisco!" West wheezed from the floor.

Vibe groaned, bleeding. His movements were slow, his face pressed to the floor. West, too, struggled to rise, but Frost moved swiftly toward the center console again and pressed her foot to West's chest to keep her down.

"This was even easier than I thought," Frost said. "Now. How about we give your dear Flash a call?"

* * *

_In the vibe, Cisco sobbed into his hands. Caitlin couldn't tell where he was; the whole image was staticky, like an old movie._

_From elsewhere, West approached._

_"_ _Cisco," she said. "You should be asleep." She paused, taking in his buried face, the tears that leaked between his fingers. "Nightmare?"_

_"_ _Eiling's facility again," Cisco said, scrubbing at his eyes. "Eiling tortured me for hours, you know? And Rose for longer."_

_West stayed silent._

_"He wanted to know about Killer Frost," Cisco said. "He wanted to know about Caitlin. And you know what?"_

_More quiet._

_"I endured all of that for her," Cisco said, "and she couldn't even decide who to save. Me or Rose. What kind of_ friend _can't decide that?"_

_Caitlin screamed. She clawed at the dry red spot on the floor of her cell. She burst._

_The second time Eiling had asked her to freeze some innocent soul's hands, she had reluctantly complied. The third, fourth, and fifth time, she had hardly felt the pain. After that, she had lost count, just as she'd lost count of the days and her waking moments and where she had come from. This last time, it had been remarkably easy._

_Still, though she couldn't remember precisely why, though she couldn't understand it, she screamed. The ice spread across the floors, climbed the walls, cracked the window. In an instant, the entire room was encased._

_"_ _Welcome to hell, Snow," she could hear Jason's voice, the voice of her once-kidnapper, saying. When she blinked up at the blue, glittering walls of her cage, she could almost see him, ghostly. "Looks like I was right after all. Looks like these powers will make you a monster in the end."_

* * *

As Frost completed the circle of ice around West's wrist, the woman whimpered. In the chair beside her, Vibe struggled weakly, but it was no use. The ice shackling his and West's wrists to the chair arms was as strong as iron.

"Please," West said. "Cait. This isn't you."

"Don't make me freeze your mouth shut." Frost shouldered between the two chairs to the computer console. "Believe me, I will."

A few quick swipes on the computer screen, and Frost had pulled up the comm controls. She unmuted the Flash's first. His heavy breath echoed loud throughout the cortex, tinny, wheezing.

" _C-C-Cisco?_ " he rattled. " _Iris? What w-w-was that?_ "

His heartbeat still stuttered in the aftermath of the shock, all of his systems struggling to reconcile with the attack. He sounded confused, hurt, but not scared in the way Frost had expected him to be. It was time to rectify that.

She clicked on her end of the comms. "I thought you liked a bit of lightning, Flash. It gave you your precious powers. That's all that matters, right?"

A quickening of the heartbeat on screen. " _Who is this_?"

"Someone who plans on making your life hell before she takes it," Frost said idly. As she spoke, she traced Vibe's jawline, dipped her fingers down to brush his throat. Even without extending her powers, the throbbing pulse she found there was enticing. The pressure in her temples was building. "You'd better come quickly before I get ahead of myself. I wouldn't want to kill both of your friends before you have a chance to witness it."

"Barry! It's her, it's C—"

But Frost turned muted both ends of the comm again before West could finish the statement, pulling up the previous screen on the computer. She keyed in a few commands while her captives struggled on either side.

"Cait." Vibe seemed insistent on repeating the name as much as he could, though his articulation was slurred. "I don't know what Eiling did, or what he's promised you but…please. Don't do anything you're going to regret."

"Mm." Frost hummed while she worked, the noise rising in pitch to rival the timbre of that persistent hum in her head. When she saw the GPS dot of the Flash begin to move, she raised a hand to begin ticking off fingers. "Five…four…three…two…"

"Caitlin."

Sparks flew around the Flash's feet as he skidded to a halt. His single-word statement was breathy, pained, disbelieving. Frost's hand stayed on the desk, her nails scraping the laminate.

"Flash. I trust you got my message."

Flash's jaw worked, but it seemed like he could produce no sound. Frost wondered which trite plea he would try first. None of them sounded appealing, so she spoke before he could try any.

"You'll forgive me if I made you run around a bit. I needed just a little distraction time so I could get your friends into place." Her free hand slid again to one of her captives, this time tracing the side of West's neck.

"What do you want?" Flash said hoarsely.

So, he was skipping the pettiness.

Frost smiled vacantly. "I want you to choose which one I kill."

She saw his movement before it happened. He rushed for her in a blur of lightning and color, but not fast enough. Never fast enough. For an instant, the yellow crackled in her vision.

Her hand slammed the defibrillator button once more. The shock passed through him, and he crumpled.

* * *

_"_ _Good, Frost, good…" said Eiling. "It's easy, isn't it? Thoughtless. Simple when you don't have to make any of these decisions."_

_The muffled wailing from the latest victim disappeared as the door closed. The residual buzzing from the latest electrical shock still sang in Caitlin's blood. Her fingers twitched. She had been instructed to freeze both legs of the victim. She was sure she had done it._

_But instead of unstrapping her as the scientist usually did after her successes, the man reached for the system console. Caitlin was still too foggy to say anything._

Beep.

_The shock brought Caitlin back to the present. She spat, all of her muscles twitching, the pain familiar, piercing, but worse in its unexpectedness._

_"_ _Why?" she said. "I followed orders. I did what you asked."_

_"_ _I've got another one for you," Eiling said. "And I thought I told you to stop asking questions."_

_He nodded at the technician. Another wave of agony. Caitlin blinked away spots. Eiling was grinning._

_"_ _What other t-task?" Caitlin chattered._

_Eiling looked to the technician. Before Caitlin could protest the injustice of it all, he flicked a switch, and she was blinded once again._

_When she came back, gasping, Eiling looked on the verge of laughing. "I want you to do what you've been dying to do from the beginning." He nodded again toward the technician, but this time it wasn't a nod to him, but at him. "I want you to kill him."_

_The technician himself looked just as shocked as Caitlin felt. He scrambled for words, appealing to Eiling, but Eiling had eyes only for Caitlin._

_"_ _Do it," he said. "I'm giving you the opportunity to put an end to all of this suffering. I don't want to see you in pain anymore, either. So here is your shot."_

_With the most recent set of shocks, that building pressure, the zinging sound in her head, began to build. Unbidden, almost a reflex now, Caitlin's fingers frosted._

_Panicked, the technician abandoned his post and circled behind Caitlin's chair to the door. While she couldn't see him, she could hear him frantically pounding at the door. Locked, of course. She'd tried many times to claw her way out of that room, and she knew that the door was always locked._

_"_ _I see that you want to," Eiling continued. "Look at you. You've suffered enough."_

_"_ _No," Caitlin muttered, but it was true. The ringing noise felt like needles through her eyes, and the frost was leaking down the arms of her chair like sap down a tree trunk. It pooled at her feet, poisonous._

_The technician noticed this. He rushed back into Caitlin's vision, rushing back to the console._

_"_ _Don't touch me," he said, looking down terrified at the frost. "I'm under orders, I'm just…"_

_"_ _Do it, Frost."_

_Caitlin clenched her fingers on the chair, willing the ice flow to_ stop, stop _, but it seemed the more piercing the siren became, the less she was able to control. The slight movement of the fingers was enough to spook the technician, and, in his last line of defense, he flipped the switch._

 _First came the pain, and the pain continued through the vibe. Cisco was kicking around a cardboard box, repeatedly._ Thud. Thud. Thud.

_"_ _Are you going to keep kicking that box or are you going to help us?" West appeared and tossed a stack of books into another box with a bang that brought the rest of the world into focus._

_"_ _Are we putting this stuff in the basement or what?" Long-legged, sparking with energy, Flash strode into view, carrying a stack of papers up to his chin. Single pages, like flakes of pale skin, dropped to the floor intermittently. "Tossing it?"_

_"_ _Might as well," Cisco said, and he upended a drawer into the empty box. Glass crunched as bottles and test tubes and syringes and all manner of metal tools met the bottom at once. The instruments were familiar in a way Caitlin couldn't immediately place, but she comprehended when she realized that the setting, too, was familiar. It was her workstation at STAR Labs._

_The desk was uncharacteristically bare; along with the tools and books and equipment, thrown into boxes were knickknacks, awards, photos of friends, photos of a man with an engagement ring. The picture frame cracked at the bottom of the boxes like the other items, or, indeed, like her entire being._

_"_ _This stuff is useless," Flash said. "I don't see any reason to keep any of it. Her replacement certainly won't need it."_

_"_ _Have we found one yet?" Cisco asked, frowning._

_"_ _Not yet, but how hard can it be to find someone who knows medicine?" said West with a shrug._

_Another deafening, frightening boom, as a heavy picture frame was dropped in the box. It was one featuring Caitlin, but surrounded by the others in the room—West, Flash, and the other man. Vibe. He was Vibe._

_"_ _It's good that we're moving on," he said. "This has been holding me…holding us back. Maybe now we can finally focus on more important things."_

_"_ _She doesn't deserve our energy, anyway," Flash said bitterly. "Not after what she's done."_

_He sped the boxes of broken things out of the room, and the gold lightning was a shock that lanced through her even upon re-entering reality._

_How long had this been going on? She tried to think, even though thinking was next to impossible amid the shocks. The technician wasn't cutting off the electricity, not like he usually did. He was trying to kill her. He wanted to cause her pain, like he always had, like all of them did, and her world was nothing but pain, she could see that now._

_In clawing her way through it all, somehow Caitlin managed to open her eyes. Usually her muscles seized so much that she had no command over any of her movements, and, besides, the bursts of electricity were typically so short she didn't even have time to try and take control. Here, however, she fought her way through the pain, screaming her way to awareness, the world dizzy and watery and high-pitched._

_The room was alight, and not quite real, but, in a way, it was clearer than ever before. There was a way to make the pain stop, there had always been a way to make the pain stop._

_In the throes of electrocution, she focused in on the technician. He looked scared._

Good, _she thought, and she unleashed a blast of ice so powerful it encased both the man and the machine he controlled._

_The machine shorted out, and the flow of electricity ceased. Blackness pressed in, and she closed her eyes against the last throbs of hurt. Her muscles continued to spasm, though her icy blood kept her level._

_Somewhere, someone was laughing._

_"_ _Now, Frost, doesn't that feel better?"_

_She curled her fingers around the edge of her frozen chair, tried to gather her thoughts despite there being no thoughts to gather. She grasped at the cold, breathed it in, anchored herself. In the dark, sparkling room, Frost opened her eyes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I really appreciate it. I also appreciate any and all comments!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of a shorter chapter, but...I think it's worth it.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: violence (in particular, a fairly detailed description of a broken arm), plus reference to a death wish.
> 
> Enjoy!

"Get up."

Frost planted a hand on each of her hostages' chairs, frowning down at Flash.

"Get up now. I want you to see what I do to them."

Flash heaved a breath and swung to his side. Frost didn't need the suit monitors to know that the shock had done a number on him.

"Cait—"

With a smirk, Frost reached back and slammed the button again. Flash curled in on himself, jerking, and West screamed, "Stop it! Stop, you're killing him!"

"Not hardly," Frost said. "A little shock will do him good."

But the logo on his suit fizzled, smoked, and it was clear that she had wrung the last use out of the defibrillator. Flash groaned and clutched at his chest.

"How does it feel?" Frost continued, this time directing the remark at Flash himself. "It's only electricity. You should be able to handle a little electricity."

Weakened as he was, it took Flash a few seconds to find the composure to lever himself up on his elbows. With his eyes on her again, she snaked one hand down to rest on West's shoulder.

"I can help you," Flash said. " _We_ can help you."

"Not interested in your false heroics," Frost responded. "You can help me decide which one dies. It's a game you're used to playing, isn't it? You love to choose who lives and who dies, who's worth saving."

"That's not true," Flash mumbled.

"So who's it going to be this time?" Frost plowed forward. She drummed her nails against Vibe's chair and West's shoulder. "Tell me, Flash. The human or the metahuman?"

Flash pushed himself up to his knees, still heaving breath. "That's what this is about? Cait, you know I—"

"The choice isn't hard, is it?" Frost said. "You kill metahumans. You toss them to the side. It's what you do. So should I just make this simpler for you?"

The fingers near Vibe's shoulder glowed blue. Flash scrambled to his feet and held out a hand.

"Wait, stop!" he said. "No. That's not—that's not what happened, Cait. If you think that we—that we abandoned you—"

"It's the powers that make you evil," Frost goaded. "Metahumans are monsters, isn't that right?"

Flash's outstretched hand balled into a fist, dropped to his side. "Those are Jason's words. Eiling's. Not mine. You know they're not mine."

Frost allowed a trickle of ice to wind down the side of Vibe's chair. "But it's what you're thinking now, isn't it?"

"No." To Frost's surprise, Flash reached up again. With his thumbs, he hooked away the mask that disguised his face and let the cowl drop. The sight of his face, for some unattainable reason, made her heart pound fast and painful. "I don't know what Eiling told you. But it's just me. Just Barry." He paused, suddenly hesitant. "Do you…do you recognize me?"

"Stop stalling, Flash." Frost tried to rearrange her expression. Her other hand, the one on West's shoulder, began to glow.

"Okay, okay, okay," Flash said hastily. "Can you at least tell me why you're here? Why you want to kill me?"

"I was sent here to make you suffer, and then to make you dead," Frost sneered. "I don't ask a lot of questions."

"Ask a lot of questions of who? Eiling?"

" _Who dies?_ "

Frost's heart slammed against her ribcage. She could see the anguish building on Flash's familiar face, in the way his eyebrows slanted, his eyes widened. "I don't want to hurt you, but I won't let you hurt them. I will stop you, Caitlin, no matter what Eiling did to you."

"What Eiling did to me?" Frost said, her voice trembling. "What about what you did? You abandon your friends to Eiling. It's so easy for you to forget. And now, you're going to pay."

There was one more moment of hesitation. Then Frost saw the tell: the flicker of yellow in his eyes.

Just as he started to move toward her, she swung both of her hands from the chairs and aimed for his feet. The ice slicked one of his feet, and he tumbled before he could even make it two steps. He struggled to right himself, but she had reached him in two short strides.

Standing above him, she leveled her glowing hands at his chest. He lifted an arm to defend himself, his left arm, and the memory came back to Frost in a flicker:

_"_ _Ow!" Flash shouted again as West attempted to peel back the sleeve of his suit. "And I don't need a real doctor. I can heal on my own."_

_"_ _You can't heal a broken arm correctly on your own," West said. "I don't know how to set it."_

Frost grabbed Flash's outstretched arm. Upon contact, she was intimately connected with his bones, his blood, his muscle. Her probing tendrils of cold sought out the pockets of weakness, the fragile and insubstantial bonds in the bone. She could feel it there, the unnatural juncture, the remnant of improper healing, the chink in the armor.

Once she had found it, she planted a foot on Flash's chest, gripped the weak spot, and twisted.

The duality of the shrieking in her head and the thumping of her heart was so loud, she didn't hear the bone re-breaking. But she could feel it. And she could feel the tremor through the Flash's body as his muscles constricted in agony, and she could sense the air that traveled up his throat and exploded as a scream.

She dropped his arm, and he tried to scramble away, but one firm shove with her boot sent him skidding across the floor to the wall. Still cradling his broken arm to his chest, he clawed his way up to a standing position, but he was also hobbled by the frost covering his foot. The moment it looked as though he was about to bolt for her again, she conjured an icicle and shot it his way. He ducked to the side just in time, and it sank into the wall where his shoulder had been moments before.

The distraction was enough: as he leaned heavily against the wall, breathless, she strode the length of the room and dragged him upright. She slammed him hard against the wall, one hand pinioning his broken arm and the other pressing against his chest. The lifeblood, his heartbeat, were violently attainable under her fingers.

"Your heart is a bit erratic," she said. "Must have been the electricity. I can slow that down for you, if you'd like. Shall we skip straight to your death?" She cocked her head, seeking out other avenues in his chest. "Perhaps I'll freeze just your lungs. Then you'll have some time to watch your friends die before you suffocate."

Flash shuddered as the cold started seeping through his torso. "P-p-please, Cait. Come back to us. It's Barry. It's your friend, Barry."

"Shh." Frost put pressure on his arm, and he grimaced. Her own pain was mounting, blinding pain, and she needed to get rid of it. She knew how to get rid of it. "How about we get this over with? I'll make it quick. It will only be painful for a few seconds."

Flash bucked against her grip, but she shoved him back against the wall again, liquid nitrogen dripping from her hand. He gasped against the cold, and she had to avert her gaze as she focused inward on his bloodstream, deciding where to strike first. She wasn't sure why she couldn't meet his eye. But, for whatever reason, the sight made her dizzy.

"Just relax," she said in a low voice, as Flash continued to jolt and shiver. "It'll be over before you know it."

She was just starting to seek out his heart when sharp sting erupted below her shoulderblade. She cried out, and her concentration broke. Unsupported, Flash slid down the wall. Frost reached back, felt something hard and smooth lodged in her back, wrenched it out. It was a two-inch long black thorn.

Frost clutched the object so hard it drew blood from her palm. She swiveled.

At the other end of the room, very much alive, stood Rose Canton.

A chink in the armor. A crack, spreading across a carefully-constructed porcelain vase, or splitting the smooth surface of a frozen lake. Frost faltered, something hiccupping in her brain.

"You died," she said once she'd managed to formulate speech. "You—are you real?"

She remembered the shadowy memory of Jason, taunting her from her frozen cell. Rose Canton motioned at the thorn in Frost's hand.

"You tell me."

The warm blood sent rivulets of steam down Frost's back, the wound itself not debilitating but deep enough to make an impression. The world was spinning, thrown out of balance. Another crack in reality.

"You're a…you're a trap," Frost said. "I don't know how…how you're alive, but…" The sound of a whistling teakettle, and a resurgence of power bubbled up through her fingers. "I can't let you stop me."

But before she could make a move, a hand gripped the back of her jacket and flung her against the wall. The speedster that pinned her— _Flash, he was Flash_ —was vibrating so violently he looked about ready to combust.

"Kill me, Flash," she said breathlessly. "Kill me. I dare you."

"What did they do to her?" Canton said quietly. Louder, she said, "What did they do to you, Snow?"

This couldn't be real. Frost had seen it with her own eyes, the mourning for a dead metahuman that they'd hardly known. Canton was dead. And yet, the blood and the wound was bitingly real on Frost's back.

She tried to ram the splintering truth back into place, but it no longer fit.

Frost struggled, needing to relieve the pressure in her head, needing to get the power out from under her skin, but she was too dazed to get a true grip. She looked to the side and saw in the next room a movable whiteboard home to a state map. She couldn't see details, but she saw clearly, in red, the triangulations, the marker scrawls of _Eiling_ and _Caitlin?_ Evidence of an organized search.

Another crack. A fragment of reality came loose, fell away. Frost tried to shoulder loose from Flash's grip, but he slammed her back. In return, she slapped his arm away and shoved him hard in the middle of the chest.

"Go on, kill me," she provoked. "Kill me."

But something drew her eye the other direction, to another room off of the cortex. Pieces of the carefully-molded vase were chipping away at an increasing rate, raining down around her feet. The space she looked into had once been her workspace.

And she had vibed it—she had vibed it, hadn't she? The crashing of boxes and the shattering of picture frames, the destruction of a life. _Replaceable._

The desk was stacked with books, papers, instruments. Relics. Artifacts. All familiar. All untouched.

Picture frames. A man with an engagement ring. _Ronnie Raymond_. A group of people who now watched from the cortex. _Iris. Cisco. Barry_. And herself, in the center of the photo, smiling so wide her eyes crinkled into slits.

"Kill me." Caitlin turned back to Barry, lightheaded, nauseous. She staggered forward again and made as if to shove at his chest, but her weight was no longer behind it, and the blow didn't even throw him off balance. "Please," she continued, too weak now to shove him again, but even more desperate. Reality tumbled down around her, the thousands and thousands of cracks simultaneously at a point of rupture. "Kill me. Please. Kill me. Kill me."

She was sobbing now, dry sobs like she'd gotten used to, where the tears froze halfway down her cheeks. Every eye was on her—Canton and Barry, Iris and Cisco where they still sat restrained in their chairs, restrained by her hands, bloodied and bruised and broken by her hands. In the hallway, the red alarm light still flashed. Caitlin lifted her hands to her mouth in horror.

"Kill me," she begged. "Please, kill me, kill me…"

She was repeating it even as the room slipped away, even as the rush of memory and dizziness and realization overwhelmed her, even as her legs gave out and the world went dark and blessedly silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering-lots of inspiration for this chapter came from the excellent Angel episode "Five by Five."
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! I feel like a broken record asking for comments, but I really love hearing from you.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS CHAPTER IS INCREDIBLY LONG. It kind of got away from me, my apologies. But after all the angst, we gotta have a little comfort.
> 
> No new warnings here, just mentions of torture/brainwashing/PTSD.

The world was blue and black and blue and pulsing. At first, Caitlin thought she was experiencing another vibe, but she didn't see any people, nothing recognizable. Then a shudder passed through her, which was also odd—the vibes usually came during the electric shock treatments, and while the serum was in her blood. Serum in her blood meant no shivering, no cold.

Yet here she was, lying on a hard floor, with fever chills wracking her body. Instead of gray concrete, these walls were polished, blue, geometric. Had Eiling moved her again? She couldn't remember what she'd been doing before passing out, when the last shock treatment was.

And then, all at once, the floodgates of memory opened **.** Weeks and weeks of Eiling. The gaps. Shadows she hadn't even remembered forgetting. Killer Frost.

The name, and the very specific acts that came rushing back in association, was enough to send Caitlin back into a dizzying spin that nearly caused her to black out again. With the recollection of Killer Frost was the very real, very tangible memory of her fight at STAR Labs.

She was in a cell. Eiling had gotten her back after she'd passed out. Oh, god, he would have captured Barry, too, and Cisco and Iris and Canton—

Short of breath, she rolled sideways and saw, to her surprise, a door made entirely of spotless glass. She had never gotten anything that bright, that clean, in any of her cells in Eiling's facilities. It took a moment more to recognize it as a door to a pipeline cell in STAR.

She slowed her breath, shivered, fidgeted with her sleeve. The sleeve, too, was a surprise; the hospital gowns Caitlin had always been given were sleeveless and loose-fitting. After toying with her outfit a bit more, she recognized it as the outfit she'd been given as Killer Frost. It was military fatigues, nearly identical to the outfit Eiling always wore, save for one key difference: the camouflage pattern was in dark blues instead of greens, a sick militarization of what Cisco had described as Killer Frost's garb on Earth 2.

Suddenly, it was the only thing that mattered. The stiff cloth might have been burning her, searing through her skin. With fumbling, weak fingers, Caitlin tore at the buttons on the jacket, kicked off the boots, clawed at the pants. The clothes stuck to her like a second skin, like they'd been melded to her, like she would have to tear off strips of her own flesh just to remove whatever Eiling had branded her with.

"Whoah, hey, hey, it's okay."

In her frenzy, Caitlin hadn't heard Iris' arrival until it was too late. Her attention snapped to the hallway outside of the cell, where Iris was in an awkward half-jog in her direction. She appeared undecided on how to approach: quickly, or cautiously.

"It's alright," she continued. "You're safe. Here. I brought you something more comfortable."

She presented a bundle of clothes. Instead of opening the cell door, however, she passed them through the sealed slot meant for trays of food. Caitlin noted this precaution but chose not to comment. Silently, she accepted the bundle.

As Caitlin finished changing, Iris shifted her weight back and forth, back and forth. In contrast, these clothes were far too big on Caitlin. The sweatpants bunched around her ankles, and the navy blue t-shirt sagged low around her collarbone and beneath her arms. She kicked the offending military garb to the side and retreated back to her corner.

"Thank you," she breathed.

Iris appeared relieved at the limited speech. She clasped her hands in front of her and offered an overly-wide smile. "Of course. Are you—do you—are you feeling better?"

As close as she was, Caitlin saw clearly the bruising around her throat, the lingering redness around her wrists. Caitlin choked on her own breath, lifted her shaking fingers to bury them in handfuls of hair.

"I'm s-s-sorry," she said hoarsely. "I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

"Shh," Iris said, moving closer to the glass that divided them. "It's alright."

The tears flowed fast and hot now—the only part of Caitlin that appeared to be giving off heat—and she couldn't speak through them. _It's not alright,_ she wanted to say. _Stop lying to me._ But she could only shake.

"Are you cold?" Iris said, frowning. She backtracked quickly. "I mean, of course you're cold, I didn't…"

"The serum is out of my bloodstream," Caitlin said dully. "I don't feel it anymore."

"Serum." Iris blinked. "Right, the serum."

"It only lasts a few hours," Caitlin clarified with a hiccup. "It's gone."

"So you can't hurt anyone anymore," Iris said, understanding. Caitlin couldn't help the sob that bubbled from her throat. "I didn't mean that, I meant…"

"I know what you meant," Caitlin said. "You don't have to be kind to me."

"None of this is your fault," Iris said. "None of it. You know that, right? We all do."

"I don't want this," Caitlin whispered, as a particularly violent shiver wracked her. "I don't want any of this."

She breathed deeply, wanting it to end, wanting it to disappear, but reality remained stubbornly intact. Was it reality? It was hard to be sure, now, with the memories of the facility as present and stifling as smoke, with STAR Labs insubstantial and unfamiliar now that she was once again within its walls.

In those long weeks, back when she'd been cognizant in the facility, she had pictured her homecoming, dreamed about being back in the relative safety of the lab with her friends. Now, she didn't feel she belonged there after all. Maybe never had.

The hiss of the pipeline cell door opening drew her attention back up. Iris stood in the doorway, a hand outstretched. "Come on, let's get you something to eat." Caitlin shook her head viciously. "Something to drink, at least."

"No." Caitlin remained fixed against the wall. "I don't want anything."

She whimpered at another quake. All of her muscles were stiff and agonizingly painful under the violent shudders. Iris noticed this.

"Warmth," she said. "You need to get warm. And you can also…" Her lips tightened, reluctant. "You can also apologize to everyone, if you feel like that's something you need to do. Even though it's not."

That second option was undeniably appealing, crafted in such a way to give Caitlin pause, but it was the first option that selfishly compelled her. The cold had never bothered her before, but now it was unbearable. It reminded her of who—what—existed under her skin.

Slowly, hesitantly, she got to her feet, disregarding Iris' proffered hand. Her avoidance of contact, however, was disrupted when Iris reached forward and pulled her into a hug.

"I'm so sorry," Iris whispered, her voice muffled in Caitlin's hair. "I'm so glad you're okay."

Caitlin didn't feel particularly okay. She stood rigid, muscles tensing involuntarily at the contact, panic firing in every synapse of her brain. Even when Iris pulled away from the one-sided embrace, her muscles refused to relax.

She felt as though she was walking through liquid iron. It seemed that the serum was what had given her strength—she was relearning to walk, to breathe. And with each new passage walked, too, she was relearning what she had forgotten. Remembering what she missed. This place was not hers anymore. She had betrayed it.

Whether Iris sensed the weakness or simply was reluctant to let go, she continued supporting Caitlin by the arm and around her waist, even as they rode the elevator up to the main floor. When the elevator doors _dinged_ open, she guided Caitlin forward into the cortex, supporting her even when Caitlin's steps faltered.

The cortex was still in disarray from the previous night's events. Early afternoon light poured through one of the high windows along the ceiling, confirming Caitlin's suspicion that she'd been out for a while. Light was shed on what had been swathed in shadow the night before. Broken glass on the floor. Spackles of blood on the walls, the desk. Slicks of enduring ice lining the entire space.

But what most caused her to falter was the snap of heads her direction when she stepped through the doorway. Barry, Cisco, and Joe instantly hushed, the energy sucked out of the room by a vacuum. Their gazes were piercing, more piercing than the needles had ever been, more painful than any electric shock. Caitlin lost her breath, the feeling of suffocation rising in her throat.

"Easy. Come on. It's alright," Iris said, adding pressure to Caitlin's back to keep her moving forward. She temporarily released Caitlin's arm in order to wave the boys away. They backed off and allowed Iris to guide Caitlin through the cortex toward the medical bay. Caitlin kept her eyes averted, even though she suspected they were looking at her.

In fact, she _knew_ they were looking at her. As she passed the computer screens in the center of the room, she caught sight of a video feed. She recognized her pipeline cell by the pile of dark blue clothes crumpled in the corner.

She shuddered. Of course. She had always been watched at Eiling's facility. Why would she expect anything different here?

"Easy now. Here you go." The softness of a hospital bed met Caitlin's back, the most comfortable surface she'd felt in ages. Her spine, rigid from hours and hours in a straight-backed chair and pressed against a concrete floor, molded into the mattress. But she couldn't allow herself to relax. It was not something her body was physically capable of anymore.

"You can sleep more, if you'd like," Iris said, fiddling with something just out of view. "I think it would be good for you. Rest, I mean."

Sleep sounded nice. Unconsciousness, rather, sounded nice. An escape. That was what it had always been. She could feel it at the edges of her awareness, easily attainable.

"I'm just going to help you get rehydrated," Iris continued. "Just a little pinch, okay?"

Caitlin looked sideways at her, and for the first time she saw what Iris was playing with. In her hands was a needle.

Instinct kicked in, and Caitlin shot up to a sitting position and wrapped her arms tight about her ribs. The tears started up again in earnest.

"No, please," she begged. "Please, don't make me, I don't want it, please…"

"Okay, alright." Iris placed the IV line back down on the counter and reached for Caitlin's arm. "We don't have to do that right now. I just want to make you feel better. That's all I want, you understand? What about some soup?" Caitlin shook her head. "A glass of water?"

With arms crossed, Caitlin dug her nails in the soft flesh above her elbows in an attempt to ground herself. She couldn't help the squeak of fear, nor the involuntary shudder. "No. I won't. I won't take it. I don't want it."

As consumed by fear and guilt as she was, she almost missed the desperate look Iris threw Barry and Cisco's way. This was wrong. She was making a scene. She didn't want to make a scene. She wanted things to be normal, for herself to be normal.

"Deep breaths." She hadn't realized she was verging on a full-blown panic attack until Iris started the mantra, started rubbing slow circles on her back. "We don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I just want to help. Do you trust me?"

Did she?

Caitlin reached back, past the confusing weeks, past the vibes, back to the Iris she had known. She blinked up at the other woman. "I think so."

A flicker of distress crossed Iris' face, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. "Then you know I won't make you do anything you are uncomfortable with. Here. You're a doctor. Yes, you are. Look." She maneuvered the IV stand into view. "You can take a look at exactly what is in this IV line. You can even put in the needle yourself, if you'd like. No mystery serums."

Stiffly, Caitlin conceded. As she looked at the IV bag, she realized that didn't feel much like a doctor anymore. It had been so long since she'd exercised that part of herself. Everything was still normal around her. All of this was standard—the medical procedures, the comfort, the air of fallen adrenaline. But she could not reconcile it with her recent experiences.

"Fine," she said at last, leaning back against the pillows again after a brief inspection of the IV bag. "It's fine, just do it."

She found that staring at the white ceiling made her nauseous, so she closed her eyes. _Don't think about it. Don't think about it._

The mantra didn't work, of course, when she felt an oximeter clipped to her finger and Iris' hands on her wrist. It was even less effective when she felt the swab of cold disinfectant and the pinch of the needle on her skin. She whimpered, and the world skewed sideways.

_"_ _Complete breakdown," came the woman's voice. "Impressive. How are you managing it?"_

_"_ _A tested and perfected combination." Eiling observed from behind his window. "Cocktail of the meta serum and trace amounts of fear toxin, injected directly into the bloodstream."_

_"_ _And electroshock treatments?"_

_"_ _Something similar," Eiling said. "Pain is all we need. That, and a unique access into the psyche. Pain plus fear, confusion. The best way to break them." He grinned. "Isn't that right, Frost?"_

_Frost blinked, scrabbling for a memory, feeling as though she was on the edges of something she was supposed to know. Then a needle bit into her arm, and she felt the rush of cold enter her system._

"…see her? You can see her ribs. She's malnourished."

"What about the shivering? You don't think she's still…"

"She's in shock, Barry. These are symptoms of shock."

The hushed voices swam through Caitlin's awareness, overlapping. A heavy blanket was pulled up over her torso.

"What do we do? Don't you think Eiling will—"

Barry cut himself off as Caitlin dragged open her eyes. The world was blurry at first, but the faces hovering over her gradually gained solidity. Iris was the one adjusting the shock blanket, with Barry and Cisco hovering anxiously off to the side. When she looked over their shoulders, she saw Joe, hovering in the doorway.

"Welcome back," Cisco said with a rigid, scabbed smile.

Caitlin struggled to sit up, but Barry placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her. "Stay down, Cait. You need to get your strength back."

Finally Caitlin got a good look at him. He wore the events of the previous night with sobriety. Like Cisco, his face was bruised, and his left arm hung useless in a sling. When he inhaled, Caitlin sensed a wheeze, though she didn't know if it stemmed from the multiple electrocutions or the freeze that had crept into his lungs.

The sight alone was enough to drain all remaining strength from Caitlin's body, and she fell back onto the bed of her own accord. She couldn't escape their pitying looks, and her words from the previous night echoed back: _Please, kill me._

"I'm sorry," she said, sounding like a broken record even to her own ears. "All of you. I can't be here. I don't deserve to be here."

"Iris told us you'd want to apologize," Cisco said. "And we're here to tell you that it's not necessary. We know what Eiling did to you and…" He chewed on his lip, narrowly avoiding one of the cuts that had opened up there the previous night. "Well, actually, we don't, but _do_ we know that it's not your fault."

"How do you know that?" Caitlin breathed.

"Because we know you," Barry provided, squeezing her shoulder lightly, like he was afraid of crumpling her. "And we're so, so glad to have you back."

Caitlin swallowed thickly, almost afraid to ask the question. She looked at each one of them in turn. She shivered. "How…how long?"

An uncomfortable pause. "Two months and twenty-four days," Cisco provided. "No—twenty-five, if you count yesterday."

A lump burned in Caitlin's throat, and she closed her eyes. Barry, sensing the panic, earnestly supplied, "We never stopped looking. Not for a single day."

"Every time we would get a lead on Eiling, it would run up dry," Iris added on quickly. "He bounced between facilities, or else was so quiet we didn't even know where to start searching. The only trace of him the past month were three engineered metahumans who were wreaking havoc in Central City."

"They were all Winter Soldier brainwashed," Cisco said. "Couldn't even remember their names. We were tipped off to the fact that they were engineered metas when their power wore off within a few hours of capturing them."

"And we heard rumors of a meta further out from Central City, robbing banks and whatnot in smaller towns with ice powers, but…" Iris' voice shook. "We didn't want to believe it was you, and by the time Barry made it to the crime scenes, you were long gone. We kept holding out hope that you were…"

"What? Dead?" Caitlin's eyes slid open, her voice more accusatory than she'd meant. In reality, she was simply curious.

Iris shuffled uncomfortably. "I'm not sure what we were hoping for, honestly."

"I think death would have been preferable for all parties," Caitlin said in a low voice.

"Don't say things like that," said Joe, emerging from his corner of the room at last, looking simultaneously beaten down and determined. She wondered how many times he'd been in a situation like this, at the bedside of a traumatized kidnapping victim. "You were brainwashed too, right? Hey, don't give me that look, Iris, I'm just trying to get the facts. You know me."

Iris broke her disapproving gaze and turned back to Caitlin. "You don't have to talk about any of it until you're ready."

"No, it's fine." Again, Caitlin wondered when she would stop sounding like a broken record. When she would start sounding like a human again. Even the tenor of her own voice was unfamiliar to her ears. "It's just…a lot to handle."

Iris reached for her hand, grounding her. "Take as much time as you need."

An eternity would not be enough time. And it felt as though an eternity passed before Caitlin dared to touch the memories that bombarded her.

"Well…" Caitlin felt a wave of nausea rise as she began to speak, but she pressed it down. "It started off simple. Denying me water until I used my powers. Denying food. And, um, providing special privileges. A shower. A fruit or vegetable. A clean hospital gown."

The unspoken _but_ hung fragile in the room.

"It got worse," she continued. They started…electrical treatments. If I used my powers, the pain would stop. It was confusing, and…I couldn't…"

She shuddered in a breath. Graciously, Barry provided, "Confusion and memory loss is normal for that kind of thing. And it sounds like he was conditioning you, in a way. Muscle memory, you know? Pavlov?"

"Plus a fear toxin." Caitlin regained her voice. "There was a fear toxin mixed in with the power serum, I remember him saying now. Which is why, I think, I started having the vibes."

"The vibes?" Cisco said. "Hold up, I thought that was my thing? Did Eiling steal that from me?"

"Cisco. A little sensitivity," Iris said.

"I'm not sure exactly what they were." Caitlin proceeded, actually somewhat comforted by Cisco's brush with flippancy. "They felt like vibes, like I was watching all of you here at STAR but couldn't communicate. But I think they were…tainted. By the fear toxin. The vibes felt so real, but…"

"But you thought Rose was dead," Barry said.

Caitlin nodded. "Some things were real. Your arm, Barry—I saw that it was broken, and that you weren't allowing it to heal properly. And that was true. But then I saw you all…you all blamed me…for everything…and you cleared out my space…you stopped looking…"

She was beginning to hyperventilate, she could tell. To ground her, Cisco placed a warm hand just below her knee. "Look," he said, jerking his head at the adjoining room. "All of your stuff is still there. We would never give up on you."

"And we would never blame you," Barry added. "Why would you ever think that we would?"

"Because," Caitlin said, that choking feeling rising in her throat, her eyes burning, "I killed the scientist who was hurting you, Barry. I hurt dozens of people because Eiling ordered it. I killed the technician who was hurting me, and I killed…I killed that man in the street last night. It just hurt so much. Even after the electricity, he was in my head, somehow, this painful ringing noise, and I couldn't…I didn't know what was going on, I didn't want to, I just…"

The gates broke open. All at once she wanted them to go. She didn't want them to see her like this, not cracked and split and bleeding from wounds too deep to visualize, not as this thing she had become. When the sobs started, she covered her face with her hands, too weak to do much more than that.

The air was thin and sharp in her lungs, like a knitting needle. Between the sobbing and the gasping, she was sure she was drowning herself, filling up with saltwater that stung at her rawness. This was a panic attack, she knew—but knowing it was not enough to stop it.

The world tunneled around her as she plunged deeper, submerged, and started the process of suffocation.

From within the depth that surrounded her, she heard water-logged voices, talking over each other, indistinguishable. Then one, close to her ear, wavering in its solidity: "I'm going to give you a little sedative, okay? Just something to help you sleep. That's all this is."

Caitlin was sure she was supposed to trust the voice. And yet, when she felt the prick in her wrist, she remembered that she had been led to trust a lot of things in the past two months and twenty-five days.

* * *

Caitlin was halfway across the cortex, running barefoot, before she realized that she was awake. Her heart raced fast at the shadow of fear that pursued her, like waking from a night terror. She kept running, and running, not stopping until she was in the pipeline cell with the door closed. Only then did she collapse, shivering, into the corner, while her waking moments caught up with her.

It had been a noise that had startled her so harshly. A noise, cutting through the haziness of half-wakefulness. A noise from one of the monitors, one that should have been innocuous.

_Beep._

She had been frightened by the sound of her own heartbeat. Fitting, really.

She rubbed at a sore spot on her knee where she'd collided with the floor upon rolling out of bed. Her hand bled freely from where the IV line had been minutes before.

Terror made her limbs weak, too weak to support herself, and the adrenaline was pumping out of her with each heartbeat. In order to stay upright, she pressed her back against the wall, clutched at her drawn-up knees.

 _It was just the monitors,_ she tried to tell herself. _You're with your friends at STAR. It was just the beeping of the machines they're using to keep you alive. Nothing more._

But the echo of the memory was clear, and she couldn't shake it.

_"_ _Just the press of a button," Eiling said. "An instinctual response. We don't even need the physical sensation of pain anymore. It's all mental."_

Beep.

_The ringing intensified, grew shrill, slicing. Ice spilled from Frost's fingers—she wasn't entirely sure where it was going or why she was doing it—and, as usual, the pain died down, as if the release of her powers was a release valve on the pressure building in her skull._

_"_ _See?" Eiling said. "Simple."_

Caitlin buried her face in her knees.

 _"_ _It's simple, isn't it, Snow? Look at you."_ Eiling's voice distorted, warped into something else. _"Simple solution. Lock yourself away forever. Don't let yourself feel anything. Doesn't seem like that long ago that our positions were switched. Me on that side of the glass. You encouraging the hard choices on this side."_

Caitlin lifted her head from her knees. "Hard choices?"

"Hard choices," Rose Canton, cross legged on the other side of the glass, repeated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, and happy crossover week! Please take a moment to leave a comment below with your thoughts!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I have been dreading this chapter for a while because I am really nervous about it, but it's time. There's a lot I want to say about it, so I'm going to include a long author's note at the end to save some space up here.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: minor violence (in flashback form), brief reference to abuse/violence against minors, discussion of mental illness (specifically dissociative identity disorder).
> 
> Enjoy!

"How are those flashbacks treating you? That's what this is, right? I've always found them inconvenient at best."

Canton was perfectly still where she sat across from Caitlin, save for a slight shifting as she made herself comfortable. Even as Caitlin panted, heart still pounding from the aftermath of the flashback, Canton remained attentive.

"You've been through the wringer and back," she continued. "I'm surprised you're holding up as well as you are. All your memories came back at once—that can't be easy to handle. Do you want some water?"

That stung. Caitlin drew into herself like she'd been slapped.

 _Just freeze the glass and the pain will stop_.

"Snow? You with me?"

"How do I make them stop?" Caitlin said suddenly.

Canton cocked her head. "You don't make them do anything. They either stop or they don't. You just have to find a way to ground yourself when they happen."

Caitlin looked up sharply. "Do you have anything useful to say, or did you just come here to gloat?"

Canton frowned. "Did that sound like a gloat? No that was pure, 100%, unadulterated Rose Canton advice. Take it or leave it, Snow." She softened. "What was it? The trigger?"

Caitlin considered before speaking. She didn't know Canton, not really—and their relationship had been rocky at best. Threatening to kill one member of the pair would do that to any sense of camaraderie. Still, she found herself saying, "A beeping noise. The same noise used to happen before…before the electrical treatments."

Canton nodded, slowly. "Before they made you do Killer Frost things. Yeah, I've been listening."

"They didn't _make_ me do anything." Caitlin bitterly spat back Canton's words. "I wasn't strong enough to resist. If I wasn't so weak, I could've…I could've stopped it."

"Sounds to me like you got skinned raw, "said Canton. "Trauma will do that to a person."

"What do you know about what I went through?" Caitlin said. "You don't know anything."

"Don't I?"

"Don't pretend like we're the same," said Caitlin. "You—you had no control, you were taken over by a monster. Me, I just became one."

"You throw that word around so freely," Canton said. "It starts to lose meaning after a while. You look hard enough, and soon everyone is a monster in their own way."

"As I recall, it was your word first," Caitlin said. "You and Jason were fairly convinced that people like us, people like _me_ , are evil."

"You want to know what's evil?" Canton said. "Putting people into little boxes, like Jason did. Like Eiling did. Stripping them down to their trauma. That's not who we are, Snow, and you should know that by now."

"But Thorn—"

"Thorn is no more evil than you," Canton said. "For a long time I thought she was. I was afraid of her. And that was the whole problem—I didn't accept that she was part of me, I didn't listen to her. And she was trying to protect me. From you, from Jason, from the terrible things that were happening in this city. I was scared of what was happening to me, and so was Thorn. She was just more proactive about finding solutions."

"But you—Thorn—killed your fiancé," Caitlin said tentatively.

"You've killed, too, trying to protect people you're close to," Canton replied. "It was a mistake. But mistakes don't make monsters."

"Tell that to all of the metas who were negatively affected by the particle accelerator explosion," Caitlin said.

"No," Canton countered. "Tell that to Eiling, who has _willfully_ been destroying metas' lives by taking away their will to choose. What you did as Killer Frost, what you felt, was you, but it wasn't all of you, just like Thorn isn't all of me."

"So, what?" Caitlin said in a whisper. Canton's words made her more terrified, perhaps, than she had ever been. _What you did as Killer Frost was you._ "What's the point?"

"The point is," Canton said, "you've got to stop labeling the parts of yourself that you're scared of as evil, as monstrous. You've got to accept that they're there, that they're valid. And you've got to listen to them and understand what makes them so frightened."

_"_ _She doesn't deserve our energy, anyway," Flash said bitterly. "Not after what she's done."_

Blue and black.

_"_ _We can't let her know we think she's a murderer."_

Blue and black.

 _"_ _You've got nobody, Frost." Eiling's face was close, his sneer the only thing in her vision. "You deserve all of this pain, don't you? Nobody is going to want you now that you have these powers, especially not when we find a way to make this permanent. You've got_ nobody _, because you know, deep down, that these powers made you something terrible. You know, deep down, that you deserve this."_

_The scalpel dug deeper into Frost's arm, and she gasped out, "I know."_

"Snow?"

But Caitlin was halfway lost, preoccupied with the white scar on her arm, just above where the bruising on her wrists stopped.

When she didn't respond, Canton provided, "Those days with Eiling, he said all of the things I'd told myself my whole life to try and break me. He was convinced that Thorn was the evil he needed."

"You said that Thorn was trying to protect you," Caitlin said, lifting her head at last, almost too afraid to ask the question. "Protect you from what? When did you start to imagine her?"

It was a moment before Canton responded, and Caitlin immediately regretted asking the question.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to…"

"It's fine," Canton said. "Like I told you, when I was young." She paused to suck on her bottom lip, considering. "It was my older brother," she continued. "I was part of a science club, after school. There was a girl there I liked. My brother found out, and he—well, let's just say he didn't approve. Of any of it. Girls didn't belong in science clubs. Girls shouldn't like other girls."

She took a long breath to steady herself.

"He would find us after school, make threats," she said tersely. "Some of which he would follow through on. But we were young, and Maisie was too scared to tell anyone. So was I. Because when you love someone like I loved my brother, you never imagine that they'll hurt you like that." A long, hard swallow. "Maisie's parents finally noticed when she came home with a black eye, even though she wouldn't tell them who'd done it. They moved away and I never saw her again."

"I'm sorry," Caitlin breathed.

"I imagined Thorn as the person who could finally stand up to him," Canton said. "She wanted to kill him for what he'd done. She thought he deserved it. I did, too. But she was more ready to act on it. I just wanted justice."

"Aren't those the same?" Caitlin said. She'd been conditioned to think as much, through Oliver's methods, through the results of some of Barry's fights. Sometimes death was justice.

But Canton shook her head. "Thorn thought he was a monster that should be put to death. The problem is, once we start thinking of people as monsters, we forget that they're people. And that makes it so much easier to inflict injustice without consideration, without mercy."

"He didn't deserve mercy," Caitlin said.

"I never said Thorn was wrong for wanting him dead," Canton said. "I wanted him dead, too. But I also couldn't lose sight of his humanity, for fear that others might lose sight of mine. I finally came forward and spoke against him, when he expanded his circle of influence. He's been locked up for years, and I pray every day that it's what he deserves."

"So Thorn was…"

"Just a part of me that I'd never noticed," Canton said. "Trauma was the spotlight that helped me see her. And the particle accelerator explosion was the trigger that gave her physical power." She held up her hands, fingernails outward as a demonstration. "But powers aren't what make people evil. They didn't make me evil. And they certainly did not make you evil."

"I don't know if I believe that," Caitlin said quietly.

"Maybe one day you will," Canton said firmly. She dipped her chin. "But we're not the same, you and me, make no mistake. And I assume it wasn't just the physical pain that turned you into Killer Frost."

Caitlin thought about it, thought of the painful vibes and the distortion that still felt as real as knife cuts. Even now, thinking back, she couldn't figure out what had been reality in those visions and what had been fractures.

"Losing the people I love," Caitlin finally said. "That's what did it. Being forgotten, rejected, replaced." She swallowed. "Being responsible and blamed for death at my own hand."

Canton snorted, and the sound shocked Caitlin into drawing her knees up tighter. "What's the old saying? The only thing to fear is fear itself?"

"Kind of cliché, isn't it?" Caitlin said.

"Yeah." Canton smiled. "How about this. Don't judge a puzzle by the unattractive piece. Sometimes you just need a little context to see the beautiful picture."

"Kind of cheesy."

Canton laughed again. "I guess I've been hanging around your team too long."

She jiggled one knee, cross-legged on the floor of the pipeline. Her mouth was a pink half-moon in its own private joke, her eyes sparkling with vibrancy. A lot had changed in three months, Caitlin thought. Even longer, still, since the two of them had assumed this same position, mirror images; except back then it had been Canton curled up in the cell like a frightened animal. There was a rhyme to it, Caitlin thought, a dissonant rhyme like one might find at the end of a melancholy poem.

"So, hard choices?" Caitlin said.

"Hard choices," Canton confirmed. "Whether you're going to pay attention to the parts of you that scare you, and let them live. Or if you're always going to stay scared of yourself for something that was out of your control. If you're going to lock yourself up in here forever like the monster you're not."

"It's not that easy," Caitlin said, willing Canton to understand. "I'm not sure I can trust myself anymore. My hands. What if I touch something and…" She swallowed.

Canton picked up on this, stopped jiggling her leg. Something about the way she tilted her head, stilled her movements, reminded Caitlin of a cat, staring curiously at its own reflection.

"You've got to trust the things that you know," she said. "You were always logical, right? So put that logic to good use and realize that the serum isn't in your system anymore. Ergo, no powers to accidentally hurt people with."

Logical. That was what she had been, wasn't it?

"And if I start forgetting things again?" she blurted out. "If I start forgetting about Barry and Iris and Cisco? I can still hurt people without my powers."

"That's the spirit," Canton said heartily, chuckling.

"But—"

"Please, Snow," Canton said. "Even if I believed you would turn against them again, you'd be going up powerless against three metahumans and Iris West. Good luck doing much damage."

"I could, you know," Caitlin said, quietly. "Turn against them again. Eiling managed it so easily. I believed so easily."

"Again, logic." Canton tapped the side of her head. "You know now that the crap Eiling fed you and the stuff your mind created was a lie. I'm alive. Your friends never stopped looking for you. Something tells me that illusion is not going to work on you again, now that you know it's an illusion."

_But is it?_

Canton raised herself up off of the floor and brushed off her pants. Caitlin stiffened as she reached for the control panel, flicked at the controls. The cell door slid open.

"You can stay in here as long as you need to," Canton said. "I get it, believe me. But I think you should take your own advice sometime, extend forgiveness to yourself as you have for others."

Her mouth tightened, her hands curling into fists, and for an instant Caitlin saw a shadow of the scared, guarded woman who had stood beside Jason as he vowed to exterminate metahuman powers.

"And just for the record," she added, "I'm really sorry for what happened to you. I know that it happened because you—because you sacrificed your freedom for my life. I'm not sure anyone else would've given me that chance." Another twitch of the mouth, like her muscles couldn't decide whether to smile or to frown. "That's how I know that you're good."

Abruptly, like she couldn't stand to look into that pipeline cell any longer, she pivoted. She didn't pause to give Caitlin time to say anything else; then again, Caitlin didn't have anything else to say.

With Canton gone and the cell door open, the pipeline again felt cold and unwelcoming. Caitlin half expected Iris or Barry or Cisco to venture down to speak with her, especially after she'd bolted out of her hospital bed in such a rush, but, then again, they had probably watched the whole exchange anyway and knew not to disturb her. She forced herself not to look up at where she knew the camera was positioned. It was a silent but tangible reminder amid the low buzzing of the pipeline lights.

Had the pipeline always been this cold? Caitlin hugged herself tighter. The irrationality of her terror-stricken awakening had worn off, her heartbeat back to a normal speed, and Canton's words felt more grounded than they might have in the midst of Caitlin's former panic. She tried to make sense of them, parse out Canton's advice, her confidence.

In drawing her arms closer, she realized that she was still bleeding freely from where she'd ripped out the IV line. The crimson spilled out over the back of her hand, channeling through the ridges of her knuckles, painting her fingers and her palm a sticky red. For a minute she watched the point of injury, studying the way the blood beaded up and trickled down with each pulse. It was a process that might have hypnotized her for hours, but, then again, logic told her that the tiny wound would heal itself over in less time.

With one surprisingly steady hand, she grasped the edge of her STAR shirt and began cleaning the blood off of the other.

* * *

The hush was palpable when Caitlin crept back into the cortex, her bare feet hardly making a sound on the cold floor. _Pad pad pad. Stop._

"Cait," Iris said, the first to speak of the five who gathered around the central controls. Barry, Cisco, Joe, and Canton appeared too taken off guard to speak. Well, perhaps not Canton: she raised her eyebrows, too, but not in shock. In approval.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," Caitlin said, hugging herself. "Sorry."

"Not at all," Barry said, while Joe said, "No need to apologize," while Cisco blurted, "We weren't talking about anything."

She knew Cisco well enough to know that suspicious tone of voice, but before she could say anything, Iris supplemented, "Do you need anything? How are you?"

"Alive," Caitlin said shortly. "Thanks to all of you. What are you talking about?"

"Just…how happy we are to have you back," Barry said.

Caitlin raised her eyebrows. "Just because I've been isolated for three months doesn't mean I've forgotten how to tell when you're lying."

"Let me help you get back into bed," Iris said. "Can I get you some soup? Some oatmeal?"

Caitlin shuffled forward, her skin crawling. She wasn't sure what was worse: the general chill that still clung wax-like to her skin, or the more specific chill radiating from the hushed group gathered around the cortex computers. "You can tell me what you're trying to hide from me."

There was another silence. Barry scratched at his sling.

"Listen," Canton said at last. "Eiling is still at large. We all know that. Even though you're back at STAR, things are not back to normal."

"It's clear that you weren't the only person he was experimenting on, brainwashing," Barry added. "We don't know how many other innocent people are still trapped with Eiling."

Caitlin crept further into the room and peered at the computer screens. Cisco went instinctually for the mouse to shut down whatever was on the screen, but it was no use. The series of maps and looping traffic cam footage were obvious.

"You're looking for Eiling's base," Caitlin said. "You're going after him." She swallowed, and the saliva felt sticky in her throat. She exhaled forcefully, trying to stay in control.

Barry shifted his weight from foot to foot. "We have to, don't we? Innocent people are still in hell. We can't just give up because you're safe. Not that we want you involved," he added quickly. "No, we're leaving you out of this. Don't worry."

"You can't leave me out of this," Caitlin said. "I'm not safe. You think that just because I'm here, Eiling's going to give up on me? If anything, I'm putting you all in danger just by being here."

"Don't say that," Cisco said softly.

But Joe interrupted: "No, she's right. No, hear me out. I'm not saying we should kick her out, but she's right. If Killer Frost was Eiling's trump card, I get the feeling that, sooner or later, he's going to come looking for her."

"He will," Caitlin said, drawing focus from all points in the room. She held up her arm, pointed at the jagged scar. "A tracking device. He, um, installed it. Before he started sending me on missions."

The drop of silence was so uncomfortable that Caitlin instantly wished she'd kept her mouth shut, but Joe nodded.

"See?" he said. "We're running on a clock."

"So, what?" Iris looked from her dad to Caitlin. "We're not using Caitlin as bait, if that's what you're thinking. Caitlin, I'm sorry, but we're leaving you out of this."

"I don't want to be left out of this," Caitlin said, suddenly struggling to make her voice audible. If she'd been honest with herself the past few hours, she might have seen this coming. She knew, from being forced to antagonize them, that there were potentially dozens of other faux-metahumans like her in Eiling's facility. And no matter how hard she tried, she knew she would never be able to banish that thought from her mind.

She knew, also, that she would never be able to live with herself if any of her friends in the cortex were hurt by Eiling while she cowered in a corner. This thought, and this thought alone, was what drove her. Necessity, like food and water had been.

"Cait—" Cisco said.

"Please," Caitlin said, and the feeling of being outside of her own body was suddenly overwhelming—her lips moving of their own accord, her mind screaming _Don't do this, don't say this_. "Let me help."

She half-wished they would say no again. She half-wished she would pass out for a third time, linger in the blackness until this nightmare was over. But this situation, like the past three months, afforded her no luck.

After a shared look of hesitation, Cisco, Iris, and Barry nodded. "Let's get to work."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I really appreciate it.
> 
> Okay, here's something I want to talk about. This chapter came about partly (mostly?) because I felt like I made a mistake in the first part of this series, Calamity Will Strike. I included a character in the comics who experiences dissociative identity disorder, Rose Canton, and I feel that I did so rather thoughtlessly. It was only later on (and after the "Magenta" episode of The Flash) that I realized I may have made a serious error in my portrayal of this character. Although I suffer from mental illness, I do not experience DID and I felt that I fell into the common trope of "multiple personalities = evil" by insinuating that Rose has a good/bad side. This was my own mistake for not realizing what I was doing as I was doing it, and I honestly felt so bad about it I considered not continuing the series.
> 
> First off, I'm very sorry if I offended anyone. I have since done a lot of reading, a lot of listening, a lot of researching. This chapter is my attempt to start making things right, because while I never intended for Rose Canton to be an "evil" character (the redemption arc was always planned), I also felt like I glossed over an important aspect of her character by assuming that Thorn is her dark side-I needed to examine the complexities and nuances in order to do Rose/Thorn justice (because this series is all about complexity/nuance). Trust me, the last thing I want to do is demonize mental illness, and perhaps this is something I never should have touched in the first place. It is my hope that this chapter clears up some things. Again, I am in no way the expert, and I have just used what I've read. If it feels on the nose, that's because I wanted to be clear about what I was trying to say.
> 
> I welcome discussion, and feedback, and correction. I'm doing my best, but I can always do better.
> 
> Thanks for always sticking with me even when I make mistakes.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for the response to the last chapter! I worked so hard to get it right, so it's really gratifying to hear feedback. You are seriously the best readers I could've asked for. So perceptive, and thoughtful, and gracious!
> 
> After all that, and after the midseason finale last night, you deserve some fluff! So here, have a chapter of fluff!

"Hey."

Caitlin looked up at Barry and Cisco's entrance and put on her best stern face, which, admittedly, wasn't much. "If you're going to try to talk me out of it again, you shouldn't bother."

"We're not." Barry took a seat at the end of her bed, while Cisco hopped onto the spare one a few feet away. "Just here to talk. To…see how you're doing."

Caitlin wasn't stupid. She knew that nobody wanted to leave her alone, especially not after she'd made it clear that going after Eiling was partly her responsibility. With Iris and Joe making a run to the police station, and Canton who knew where, that left Barry and Cisco to play babysitter. They looked just about as uncomfortable as she felt, sitting there in that medical bay. Iris had left Caitlin with a mug of soup and a blanket, but she still felt a chill that may or may not have been related to the void she imagined between herself and her friends.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to say anymore," Caitlin said. "If I'm being honest."

Barry and Cisco fell silent. The floor was suddenly the most intriguing part of the room, for all of them.

"This was never supposed to happen to you," Barry said. "It should have been me. I should've given myself up to Eiling and let you and Rose escape."

"Yeah, and then we would've had a brainwashed speedster on our hands," Cisco said. "Let's be real, I started all of this. I stepped out of my apartment at night and got myself kidnapped like an idiot. And I gave Eiling all of the information he needed to know about Killer Frost."

"Please don't do this," Caitlin said abruptly. "There's only one person to blame for this, and we're going to stop him. And I…" _I'm glad it was me._ The aches throughout her entire body flared to life with each heartbeat. She sighed, wincing at the effort of folding her legs. "Okay, I won't say that I wouldn't have had it any other way. I wish that none of us would've had to go through this, but…it's done. There's nothing we can do to change what happened."

She swiped the knuckles of one hand over her cheekbone. To clear the air, she cleared her throat, which still felt swollen and raspy, damaged from lack of hydration and abundance of screaming. Softening, Barry motioned at object still clutched in one hand. "He made you believe that wasn't real, didn't he?"

Caitlin looked down. To be honest, she'd forgotten that she was holding the picture frame, despite the fact that she was clutching it so tightly it was leaving indents in her palm. Iris, Barry, Cisco, and herself smiled up from within the frame.

"It's partly what brought me back," Caitlin admitted, running a thumb over the faces in the photo. "Seeing that you hadn't given it up. That you hadn't given _me_ up."

Cisco craned his head to get a better look at the photo. "That was when the four of us went to the lake for the weekend, right? We should do that again, once this is all over."

"Yeah," Caitlin said, although she was starting to get the feeling that this would never be over. Not really. She put the picture back on the bedside table, careful to keep the mug of soup upright on her lap. The longer she looked at the framed photo, the more she caught sight of her fuzzy reflection—the short, bleached hair that didn't feel like hers.

Cisco took notice of the soup and motioned at it. "You should probably eat that before it gets…" Abruptly, he cut himself off. "While it's still warm. I think you get more nutrients when it's warm. You know. Nutrients for your health."

"Funny, I've never heard that before," Caitlin said. She considered the viscous red liquid. "I'm not really hungry."

"That's a strange statement to come from someone whose bones are practically sticking out of her body."

"I don't really have an appetite," Caitlin said, suddenly self-conscious. She wished she could pull the blanket tighter around her shoulders without being obvious about it.

"Listen, we're not going to make you eat it, if that's what you're thinking," Cisco said. "Especially if you're just going to puke it up, because, ew. But it would make me happy if you did."

"It would make me feel a little better about the fifteen burgers I ate as a snack yesterday," Barry said.

Caitlin's mouth twitched involuntarily. "You need that. For your metabolism."

"That's what he tells all of his dates," Cisco said. "'It's not me, it's my metabolism.'"

The smile crept further across Caitlin's face. The two boys were more relaxed now, physically; she could sense the involuntary release of tension from the usual jabs.

"Fine," she said. "If it will make you happy." She raised the mug of soup to her lips but found that the one hand was too shaky to support it; hoping her friends didn't notice the droplets that splashed overboard, she brought her other hand up for stability and drank.

It was hot, and rich, and more savory than anything she'd tasted in three months. The abundance of flavor was so cacophonous to her senses that she immediately coughed it up again, her esophagus sticky and constricted and her body trained to reject such luxury. Still more soup sloshed out of the mug, scalding her fingers and staining the sheets red.

As she finished hacking, she held up a hand to still the now-vigilant Barry and Cisco. Dispelling the last of the offending liquid from her lungs, she managed, "Sorry. Don't worry. Give me a second."

"Thought I told you not to puke," Cisco said weakly from his corner, but the hesitation was back. Desperate to dismiss that hesitation, get back to the feeling of normalcy, Caitlin waved her hand more desperately.

"No, I can do this. See?" Although the prospect of more soup made her stomach turn, she again raised the mug and took a sip. Now that she knew what to expect, the liquid went down more easily, and the warmth slipped closer to her core. Though her gag reflex still threatened to overwhelm her, she took her sips methodically, determinedly.

At the end of the bed, Barry beamed at her, like she was a small child performing unexpectedly well in some mundane task. The way he was looking at her, she half expected him to pull out a blue participation ribbon. "It's good, isn't it? Iris makes the best soup. See, you're doing just fine. You're getting better."

"Barry," Cisco warned, his voice going uncharacteristically low.

"What? I didn't—" He sighed. "Look, Cait, I know this isn't going to be some quick and easy fix, but look. This is progress. That's something, right? We can take small steps together."

He shifted to a more comfortable position on the edge of the bed, but in doing so he jostled his arm just enough to elicit a wince. Caitlin blinked, felt again the precise breakage in his bones, how _good_ it had felt in that moment to sink her icy fingers in and fill those cracks with silver—

"You really shouldn't be using that sling on its own," she said haltingly. She set down the soup; now not even both of her hands was enough to keep it steady. "You should use a splint with an actual cast. It will heal faster that way. I assume you didn't set the bone after it was re-broken."

"Um." Barry looked to Cisco. "No. No, I didn't." He relieved Caitlin of her soup mug, depositing it on a side table while she adjusted to a more comfortable position. "Do you want to…help me out with that?"

Caitlin recoiled instantly. "I don't want to re-break your arm. No, no, no…"

"Shh," Barry said. "You don't have to do that. I just thought maybe it would help if you could…see, I don't think it's actually healed at all since last night, at least not that I can tell, and I'm not sure if that's because of the whole cold thing or what, but it's probably best to get this set right if it's going to have any chance of healing."

He was right. Damn him for that.

"I just thought that maybe if you could see how much we still need you here…"

"Never mind the fact that you wouldn't need me to fix your arm if I hadn't broken it," Caitlin said. She sighed. "Come here. Let me take a look."

Barry shifted closer to her and swung his legs up, so they were both cross-legged and facing each other on the bed. Cisco retrieved the splint and cast wrapping while Caitlin eased Barry's arm out of the sling. With his arm bared, he looked expectantly at her. She reached out and felt out the swollen, bruised juncture, his skin hot against her fingers.

She pressed down. Barry winced and sucked in a breath. Caitlin jerked backward as if stung.

"Hey, it's alright," Barry said. "You can't hurt me any more. That was just an involuntary reaction. I can handle it, I promise."

"You don't have your powers anymore," Cisco said, setting down the cast on the bed. "You don't have to worry about…accidentally turning him into a popsicle or something."

So he understood, at least. For another moment, Caitlin still wasn't sure she could continue, but with these reassurances, she gathered herself.

"Okay," she said. "Give me your arm again."

She gingerly handled Barry's arm, and she could see the restraint he was exercising in not making another sound. His lips were white as she prodded the break, maneuvering his arm in order to line it up properly.

"This is what we do," Cisco joked as a way to alleviate some of the tension. "As a welcome-back present, we put all of our injured friends immediately to work. Welcome back, Caitlin."

Caitlin tried to force a smile, but it wasn't very large, given how hard she was concentrating. Concentrating not only on the logistics of getting the cast on Barry's arm, but also monitoring her own vitals, her own heartbeat, for any trace signs of icy life. Logically, she knew they wouldn't appear, but she had to be prepared if they did. She had to remain vigilant.

She managed to get the cast on without much incident, and without much noise from Barry, which she felt both relieved and guilty about. When his arm was safely wrapped and returned to its sling, she pulled away immediately.

"This should start healing now," she said. "It'll be functional in a few hours, probably, but try not to push it."

"Thanks." Barry adjusted the sling himself. "I appreciate it."

"Any other broken bones I need to know about?" Caitlin said, only half-joking.

"Not currently," Barry said. "I mean, there was an incident two months back involving an earthquake and some falling rubble—"

"Dude, you said you wouldn't bring that up again."

"It was Cisco," Barry explained. "He started an earthquake with his powers while he was inside of a building." He grinned, and Cisco rolled his eyes.

"It was super heroic, okay?" Cisco said. "Very superhero-like. I mean, it was an accident, but still. Superhero."

"Until that piece of rubble broke your—"

"We said we wouldn't mention it again." Cisco held up a finger. "We agreed not to mention it again."

Barry shrugged at Caitlin, the teasing light still in his eyes. "He was very embarrassed. He wouldn't let me or Iris stay with him in the med bay at all."

"I wouldn't be talking, Mr. I-Mope-Whenever-I-Break-My-Nose-Running-Into-Walls.'"

"Wait," Caitlin said. "Back up. You said Cisco created an earthquake?"

"Well, it was kind of an accident, like I said," Cisco said sheepishly. "One of these days, I'll finally discover a new aspect of my powers on purpose. Can we talk about how Barry accidentally phased himself through a chair because he got startled by a spider, because—"

"No, earthquake," Caitlin insisted, a memory niggling at her, broaching the surface. "Cisco can cause an earthquake. Eiling's base is underground."

Barry and Cisco paused, then exchanged a look. She could see the idea growing on their faces just as it was growing in her mind. A tiny blossom of hope, just the barest inkling of warmth and softness and brightness, flared to life in her heart. She clung to it.

Cisco looked back to her, narrowed his eyes. "Keep talking."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! As always, I crave feedback. And the best to all of you as we enter yet another hiatus.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No new warnings or anything here, just some more setup before the action kicks into gear again!
> 
> Enjoy!

As much as she wanted to, Caitlin couldn't separate this planning from the planning that had gone into the last botched Eiling rescue attempt.

All of the fervent talking, the circles of bodies, the crossed arms, the buzzing computers and frantic typing, was too reminiscent, and she had to work hard to keep herself grounded. Last time, she had come forward with her plan, and it had been a decent one in her mind—the knockout gas should've bought them the room to navigate Eiling's facility, and Barry's speed should've guaranteed an exit.

A flawless plan. Until it wasn't.

Until she'd been strapped into a chair in the same room as Jason and injected with the first dose of that serum. Until Barry had been incapacitated, the facility set to flames, Rose Canton shot in the gut.

She tried not to let such thoughts invade during these planning sessions, because she knew if she dared say a word against it, she would jinx the entire operation.

After some of the initial brainstorming with Barry and Cisco, she found herself too exhausted to do much else, and all of the talking made the inside of her mouth feel like cotton. While she didn't finish her soup, she accepted a glass of juice and an over-the-counter painkiller, just enough to take some of the edge off of her body aches.

She lay dazedly in her hospital cot, half-awake and less cognizant, but still listening to the voices that dominated the cortex. Once Joe and Iris returned, the planning got more excited, more vibrant, and the addition of Rose Canton tempered it only slightly.

None of them bothered Caitlin as she lay there shivering, dipping in and out of sleep, and for that she was somewhat grateful. The hours of being back at STAR still took their toll on her in small, unexpected ways, and she needed the isolation and the stillness to try and come back to herself.

When she finally willed herself to sit up and shuffle back into the cortex, nobody objected. She found a chair and eased herself down into it, like an old woman. She found that she constantly wavered between the two: feeling old, and being treated like a fragile young thing.

"We were just talking about the logistics of the facility," Joe told her.

She nodded and waved him off. "I've been listening. Where's Iris?"

The look Joe gave here told her that apparently she hadn't been listening closely enough. "She's grabbing your old clothes from downstairs. The, uh…"

"The military clothes," Canton said bluntly. "Cisco's going to vibe on them to try and get an exact location."

At that moment, Iris reappeared, holding the clothes in question. Caitlin stiffened, and Iris measured her steps, keeping the clothes bundled up in as small a package as possible. "Got them. How do we know this is going to work?"

"Well, we have five possible locations," Cisco said. "Based on known underground bunkers and abandoned facilities in a 500 mile radius. So if I can't figure it out based on this, it'll have to be trial and error."

"What if it's not in a 500 mile radius?" Caitlin said. Some of the Killer Frost memories nagged at her—bank robberies in cities that were definitively unfamiliar, in climates radically different than that of what she knew of the area surrounding Central City.

Cisco considered this. "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it." He set his jaw and looked at the bundle of clothes like it was roadkill. "Man, sometimes I hate my job."

Iris stepped away from the bundle, as if that would somehow make it easier for Cisco to vibe. With a five foot radius around him, Cisco stepped toward the clothes and, unceremoniously, sunk his hand into the pile.

It was always a fascinating experience watching Cisco vibe. If she didn't know what was happening, Caitlin might not have even noticed. To the casual passerby, Cisco might have been fighting off a headache, or deep in thought, or on the verge of a sneeze. His eyes rolled back, his face scrunched, and his lips parted. There was no physical sign aside from that, not like Barry's lightning or Canton's protruding nails.

The episode passed quickly. After a few seconds, Cisco wrenched his hand backward, stung. His eyes met Caitlin's, ever so briefly, but she could tell that it was an involuntary response. The look pierced her to the bone, a look of horror, pity, and something else. Revulsion?

The look was gone as quickly as it had come as Cisco tried to compose himself. He gulped in some air and leaned against the counter.

"Yep, got it," he said without prompting. "Definitely got it. Yep. Jesus, that never gets any more fun, does it?"

"Where is it?" Joe asked.

With another grunt, Cisco pushed himself away from the desk and circled around to the computer bank. On one screen was a map where they'd plotted out the five closest underground facilities in the area. Some of them were considered urban legends. Caitlin was half-inclined to believe those theories, feeling as though her experience itself might have been a delusion, but Cisco pointed resolutely to one of the red dots.

"There," he said. With a few deft strokes, he pulled up some of the reference images they had scrounged up from their internet searches. "Yeah, that's the one. That's what I saw."

"Looks like it's long-abandoned," Joe said with a frown. "I don't know how Eiling even got access to it."

"However he did, he somehow got past all of the preliminary scans we did back when Cait was first taken," Cisco said.

"Either that, or he started out at facilities way past our scanners and kept gradually moving back toward Central City every few weeks," Canton said. "You said you were moved to a new location a few times, right?"

Caitlin started at the realization that the question was addressed to her. "Yeah," she said. "But I don't know how often."

"This is it, I'm telling you," Cisco said, plopping down into the extra computer chair. "I can pull up schematics now. I should be able to dig out floorplans."

"And the alarm system," Iris said. "So I can access it from here."

"Alarms?" Caitlin said.

"Once Cisco creates the earthquake, the facility is going to start coming down," Barry said. "We're going to give everyone inside a little added incentive to get out of there. The more confusion, the better."

"So while you and Barry are inside getting all of the prisoners out, you won't be running into hordes of soldiers," Joe said.

Again, Caitlin's stomach turned. She ran a hand through her short hair, not quite used to the length after all this time. Her heart betrayed her. Barry set a hand on her shoulder.

"You don't have to do this," he emphasized. "I can go in there by myself. Cisco and Rose will be there keeping the soldiers at bay outside."

"You're not going in alone," Caitlin said. "You need me to get the doors to the facility open. And I know the inside better than you. I know where the cell block is." She paused. "It just feels a lot like last time, is all. I have a bad feeling about it."

"It would be worrying if you didn't," Iris said. "This is a government facility we're breaking into."

"But," Barry interjected, ever the optimist, "Eiling has lost a lot of his followers. We know that based on what we saw at the last facility. This place isn't big."

"No, it's not," Cisco said, rolling away from the desk and cracking his knuckles. "But from what I can see, there are three levels. Three sets of stairs are going to slow you down, Bar."

"Not by much." Barry scratched at his neck. "If I take two prisoners at a time, I can get the them out of there, into the pipeline, and be back for more in, what, thirty seconds?"

 _Thirty seconds where I'm alone in there_ , Caitlin thought. "Thirty seconds is a lot of time when you're in a warzone," she said.

"I can make it faster," Barry said determinedly. "I know I can. And my arm is almost healed, so I can definitely carry two. I won't have to make many trips out, depending on how many people Eiling has locked up."

"The longer we wait, the more likely Eiling is to be proactive and come after Snow himself," Canton said.

"We'll have to act fast, then," Barry said. "Tonight."

The rest of the team nodded like it was the simplest thing in the world. Somber, but simple. Another enemy to conquer. Another life to save. Another day on the job.

Caitlin felt herself sinking, deeper, deeper, into her chair, until she felt like her bones were crushing inward.

But eventually, and out of obligation, she, too, nodded.

* * *

Two hours later, Caitlin was staring again at the pile of dirtied, bloodied military garb, waiting for it to spring to life at any moment.

"You don't have to wear it," Iris said half-heartedly. "Really, Cait. If it's too hard…"

"I do have to wear it, though," Caitlin said. "If we're giving off the impression that you've been holding me prisoner, it doesn't make sense for me to be wearing the STAR stuff."

Iris bit her lip. "Well, yeah, but…"

Caitlin offered a tight smile. "My comfort is not really at the forefront of our concerns right now."

Off to the side, Barry was shrugging into his Flash suit, and Cisco into his Vibe outfit. It had been modified a bit since Caitlin had last seen it, but not by much. She wondered how much Cisco had actually been out in the field since she'd been gone. Something told her it wasn't much. A new wave of fear washed over her, and she looked away.

"Just help me into it," Caitlin said hoarsely, and she began tugging off the STAR t-shirt and sweats that had offered such fleeting reassurance. All reassurances, all comforts, were momentary.

She struggled as quickly as she could into the military garb, still self-conscious of the hollow of her stomach and the bruising around her ribs and wrists. After the soft, loose-fitting clothing she'd gotten used to, the stiff material of the coat and pants might as well have been a cheese-grater.

The tremors began in earnest, and she felt herself going faint—but there was no time for flashbacks. She couldn't afford to entertain them now, not when her mind was most needed. Not when it was so essential that she stay calm and clear-headed.

So, instead of passing out, she did the next-best thing: she leaned over to the trash can and threw up all of the soup that had been in her stomach.

"Okay, that's enough," Joe said. "This is ridiculous. You're not going out there, Caitlin."

Iris rubbed circles on Caitlin's back and helped her straighten. Caitlin wiped at her mouth. "It's nothing. I'm going."

"Seriously, you look a little green," Cisco added from across the room, where he and Barry watched with pained expressions.

"It's not up for discussion," said Caitlin. She buttoned up the last few buttons of her shirt and swallowed hard. It was a bitter taste. The others wore looks that clearly said they didn't trust her, but they allowed her to finish getting ready without further comment.

Once she was dressed, Caitlin accepted the gun that Joe offered, albeit reluctantly. She tucked it into her boot.

"As a last resort," Joe explained.

Caitlin needed no further explanation. The last thing she wanted was a weapon. In those periods of time when she would be alone in the cellblock while Barry was transporting the prisoners away, she wasn't sure she would even be able to use it.

Canton appeared then, dressed in nothing more special than her usual clothes. No disguises, no supersuits for her—although she was certain Joe or Cisco had given her some kind of body armor beneath it all. She could see it in the tight-fitting sleeves, the strange lumps at the shoulders and torso.

"Are we ready to move, or what?" she said, wrestling her mass of red hair into a bun.

Barry pulled down his mask. "Ready when you are."

Joe clapped Cisco on the shoulder somberly, offered Canton a tight-lipped smile. Then they were gone in a blur of light. The yellow of the lightning seared into Caitlin's vision.

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

Blinking, Caitlin turned to Iris. "Of course I don't want to do this," Caitlin said. "But since when has what I wanted to do had any bearing on anything?"

Iris exhaled sharply, shaking her head sadly. "You don't have to," she said. "Not this time. Not ever again."

Caitlin wanted to say something, some unformed words that lingered at the back of her tongue, but in that moment the yellow flashed again, and Barry was back in the cortex. The air crackled, and Caitlin swallowed the unspoken.

"Cisco and Rose are in position and hidden," Barry said, panting. "There's no reason to believe anyone saw us. I don't want to leave them there alone much long, though." He addressed Caitlin then. "Are you ready?"

Iris' face was still twisted, still pleading, willing Caitlin to understand. Caitlin took it all in, shoved back her emotion. It would have to wait until later.

"As ready as I'll ever be."

Iris was the first to reach forward, enveloping her in a warm, earnest hug. Caitlin wasn't sure she'd ever been hugged so tightly in her life. While the contact still made her tense, she found it in herself to raise her arms, return the embrace in whatever measure her strength allowed.

"Be careful," Iris whispered, and only when Caitlin felt wetness on her neck did she realize that the other woman was crying. "You're coming back, okay?"

Caitlin nodded numbly. Joe took Iris' place with the hugging, a brief, enveloping experience that gave a temporary illusion of comfort. Then she was face to face with Barry, who had adopted, if possible, a much more grim expression.

"You might want to close your eyes if you get dizzy," he said. He held out his hand, waiting for her to make the first move. She did, and the moment she took hold of him, she was whisked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Please leave a comment below if you feel a strange sense of disquietude about what's coming next!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe there are only a few chapters left! Let's get to some action!
> 
> Enjoy!

It might have been winter, for how cold the air was, and Caitlin could feel every bit of it. She had taken Barry's advice and closed her eyes, but there was no erasing the feeling of rushing wind, the stinging gusts of speed. The sensation had once been comforting, and she remembered it as muscles remember old dance steps—but now the wind whistled a bit too shrilly.

She opened her eyes only when the vertigo stopped, and she was disturbed to discover that the landscape was familiar. Familiar to Frost, but still familiar.

"This is it," she said. "I've been here."

"Cisco and Rose are hidden just over that ridge," Barry explained, pointing. "They should be out of sight even when soldiers start to evacuate."

Caitlin followed the line of his gesture to a stony ridge just beyond the entrance to the facility. The facility itself had been dug into a hillside, completely inconspicuous if not for the concrete frame and metal blast doors that marred the outside. They were still too far from the entrance to pick out faces, but Caitlin spotted movement in the run-down outpost just outside the door.

"Deep breaths," Barry reminded her, which was helpful—she was getting dizzy from lack of oxygen. "You've got this."

"Let's just get it over with," Caitlin said. _Before I break down again._

Barry's lips tightened. Then, in what Caitlin assumed was supposed to be as gentle a move as possible, he gripped her arms and began marching her forward.

 _It's just Barry,_ she thought. _Just Barry_. Still, it was hard to remember that when her arms were pinned, when she was back in that military uniform, when each step carried her closer to the place that had taken everything from her.

When they were within fifty feet of the complex, the guards outside began to move to a defensive position, their guns prominent. Within twenty-five feet, one of them held up a hand.

"Stop right there," he shouted. "What is your business here?"

Caitlin worked hard to keep her expression stony, dark, perhaps a bit dangerous. She kept her breath even. In. Out. One breath at a time.

"What does it look like my business is?" Barry lobbed back. "I'm the Flash. I want to speak with Eiling."

"Eiling?"

"Yeah," Barry said. "The guy who brainwashed my friend."

Oh, that was her cue. She lifted her head, tried to muster up menace. These men had doubtless seen Killer Frost in action before. They would know what she looked like. What the eyes looked like, at least: perhaps not outright malicious, but devoid of anything resembling optimism.

"Are you gonna call him, or do I have to do that part?" Barry continued. Before the men could answer, Barry sped forward. In a blink, he had relieved them of their guns and was back at Caitlin's side with a stolen walkie-talkie. "Hello, this is the Flash. Can you please connect me with General Eiling?"

He might have been laying it on a little thick, Caitlin thought, but it was satisfying to see the guards fumble now, weaponless, fear leaking from their frantic movements. More telling was the dead silence on the other end of the walkie-talkie line, a quiet that was equally satisfying and terrifying.

"How long do you usually have to wait before he shows up?" Barry said. "Is he even here?"

The answers were: not long, and yes.

A deep rumbling in the earth began, accompanied by the grating of metal against metal. Slowly, probably far too slowly for a facility of this nature, the circular blast door opened.

"Be careful," Caitlin dared to whisper from the corner of her mouth.

If Barry heard her, he didn't respond, but she could sense the zinging tension in his body, the readiness, the alertness. It had been easy for him to take away guns from two soldiers, but against a veritable army, he would need all senses firing. Eiling had taken him off guard before, with the spike grenade and, later, with the barbed net. They couldn't afford to be taken by surprise again, not now.

Although it wasn't a large army that emerged from behind the blast doors, it was a terrifying one. Perhaps a dozen soldiers stormed forward, fanning out among their two weaponless companions. From within the swarm stepped Eiling, calm as ever. His eyes went immediately to Caitlin, and she froze in terror. Surely he was seeing through her, peering into her serum-less blood and bones and into a soul that was perhaps slightly more than Frost. He studied her, searching for the truth, and she tried to replicate the emptiness she had felt last time he had seen her.

"I will say, this is a surprise," Eiling said. "I didn't expect to see you alive at the end of this. Or, if you stayed alive, Flash, I didn't expect _her_ to still be living."

"I wasn't going to kill her, if that's what you were hoping for," Barry said poisonously. She's my friend. Now tell me what you did to her."

"You never did understand the benefits of good old-fashioned torture," Eiling said. "It goes a long way in making people comply." He grinned. "You don't want me to go into the specifics, do you?"

"I want you to reverse whatever you did," Barry responded. "That's all I'm here for."

Eiling's grin turned more toothy. "And how do you propose you would get me to do that, even if it was possible?"

"I'm not above hurting you, killing you," Barry said.

"I'd like to see you try," Eiling said. "I'd also be curious to know what you would do with _her_ once I'm dead and all of my knowledge gone. You have moxie coming here, Allen, but moxie does not win wars. I thought you would know better by now."

Caitlin eyed the open blast door. It wouldn't stay open forever, and the longer they talked, the slimmer the possibility of Eiling entertaining Barry's bluff. Cisco needed to act, fast.

"You have no bargaining chip," Eiling continued. "You're so young, Allen, so naïve. I hold all of the cards. You have nothing to offer me."

"I have your weapon," Barry said, tightening his grip on Caitlin's arms. "I can give you a new one."

"Go on."

"If you take back what you did to her, I'll bring you more metahumans. Evil ones. Ones that have already done harm of their own volition. Ones that I've helped lock up in Iron Heights." He paused, perhaps to steady himself. "I'll break them out of Iron Heights myself and deliver them straight to your door, so you can do whatever you want to them. They can be your new weapons."

It was only by virtue of knowing Barry so well that Caitlin heard the lie in his voice. Still, the ghost of doubt still whispered in her ear, making her shiver. Eiling took a moment before answering, perhaps also weighing these two factors: the knowledge of who Barry was, and the doubt that spoke of a bigger darkness beneath the surface.

"You would willingly send metas to me, after what I've done to her?" Eiling gestured wildly at Caitlin, and though he was two dozen feet away, she still flinched back as though he could reach her.

Another breath. Caitlin felt Barry's fingers twitch, his skin rippling with a slight nervous vibration. "Only the ones who deserve it."

Eiling looked back and forth between Barry and Caitlin, his gaze piercing but his expression impossible to read. The evening ran dark and quiet, and if Caitlin closed her eyes she might have imagined that they were alone in the middle of nowhere. But, at the same time, she sensed the thrumming of movement and power under her feet—not earth, but the underground systems that replaced it, that housed and hid Eiling's current captives.

Then Eiling motioned with a finger, and the sound of a dozen guns cocking was sharp, metallic, overwhelming. Barry tensed, ready to spring, and Caitlin could've sworn she heard electricity popping.

"Even you're not that cold, Allen," Eiling said. "I know that much about you. And I know Killer Frost, too. That—" He jabbed a finger Caitlin's way. "—is not what I created. Nice try, both of you."

He knew. As she'd suspected, he could see right through her. And he was reaching down toward a holster on his leg, but that holster held something other than a gun.

Time elongated. And then, all at once, Caitlin realized that the movement she sensed beneath her feet had become real, had become tangible, and the earth erupted.

When Cisco said he could create earthquakes, Caitlin had thought of benign ripples, enough to induce vertigo and confusion but not much else. This, this was so much more than that. This was an upheaval of epic proportions—a rumble of thunder to match the crackle of Barry's lightning.

The ground rose up to meet Caitlin, her feet shaken out from beneath her, but just as her elbow hit the earth, she was dragged back to her feet. Perhaps Barry, with his heightened senses, was quicker to find his footing on ground that rolled and pitched like water in a windstorm; he helped her to a standing position, and she had just enough time to see Eiling and the soldiers thrown off of their feet before she was whisked forward through the open doorway.

Colors blurred together; the world streaked. She felt the change in temperature from cold to frigid, and she knew instinctively that they were going deeper underground. After a moment of activity, they stopped, shielded in a shadowy alcove. They both pressed themselves against the wall, the mustiness of the place instantly sticking to their skin.

"Any minute, Iris should—" Barry was cut off as all of the lights flickered out, replaced by a flashing red one. He broke into a grin. "There she goes."

The alarms began in earnest, just as planned, blaring their message throughout the corridor: _Emergency alert. Please evacuate in an orderly fashion. Emergency alert. Please evacuate in an orderly fashion. Emergency alert—_

The facility rippled and crumbled around them. The earthquake was shaking it to its core, a continuous shake, enough to pry loose stones and debris from the ceiling. A chunk of rock fell to the ground right in front of Caitlin, bursting on the floor and exploding into a dozen smaller pieces.

"Stay sharp," Barry said, and Caitlin realized that part of the rumbling noise within the chaos was the sound of boots thundering up stairs. The soldiers were following orders, then, the best that they could. It was working. They were evacuating.

The primal part of Caitlin knew that she and Barry should be, too; the place was coming down around them. They would be lucky if they weren't buried alive.

Another wave rocked the space, throwing Caitlin off balance again and into the wall. Barry braced himself and peered around the corner, watching the progress of evacuating men and women.

"What level are we on?" Caitlin hissed, although quiet was hardly necessary. She doubted anyone would stop them even if they noticed them.

Barry pulled away from the corner. "Two flights down. Looks like we should be clear to keep going. Where should I go?"

Caitlin reached back into her hazy memories and pulled out what was necessary. She hadn't been allowed to roam the halls freely, but she'd been marched from room to room so frequently that she was somewhat familiar with the layout of the facility. At least, familiar with the path from the cellblock to the outside doors.

"Down one more level," she said. "The bottom level is where they keep the prisoners."

"All of them?" Barry's eyebrows lifted.

Caitlin swallowed. "Should be, unless they've been moved somewhere else for testing."

"Is that likely?" Barry asked.

Caitlin considered, then shook her head. "No. I could...usually hear the screaming. I…"

She didn't finish, unable to finish. Barry understood.

"Okay. Let's do it."

With her consent, he swept her off of her feet again and they were off. A blink, two blinks was all it took to descend to the bottom level of the facility. When they stopped, it took longer for Caitlin to adjust to the darkness. The alarm red was more muted down here, along with everything else—more muted, less maintained. She recognized the dripping walls, the occasional splash of peeling paint, the stone, the chill. They were again pressed into an alcove to avoid suspicion, but it appeared that the guards had long evacuated. They were probably the first to go, realizing that they were on the bottom level of the facility and more likely to be crushed to death. Or trapped underground until suffocation took its toll.

"All clear," Barry said unnecessarily. "Where do we go from here?"

Caitlin motioned down the hallway. Three doors were stationed in this corridor, and at the end the hallway curved into another segment, where she knew another series of doors lay.

"These are all cells," she said. "Around the bend there are more. I think there's a control room somewhere around here, too."

Barry looked at her sharply. "You don't think any guards are still down here, do you?"

Again, she shook her head. "No, I don't think we'll have any trouble."

The unspoken hung between them, weighty. The guards were gone, sure. But these cell doors were closed. The captives were likely still in place, left to die. She wondered what Eiling would've thought of that. Wasting lives. But perhaps they were all expendable, after all.

"Okay, let's start," Barry said. "You go ahead, unlock the doors. I'll get them out. I can get them to STAR Labs and back in..."

"Thirty seconds, yeah," Caitlin said. She looked warily down the empty hallway. "I'll be fine. I'll work on getting them out for you."

Barry nodded, and they split. Caitlin jogged down the hallway to the last of the three doors, jiggling at the old-fashioned lock that had accompanied all of these facilities. Low-tech, indeed, was to their advantage now.

Inside, a figure huddled against the far wall. They looked up at Caitlin's entrance, pulling back tight against the wall. It was a man, shaggy hair grown down into his eyes, greasy.

"Please," he whispered. "Please, no more."

"It's okay," Caitlin said. "I'm here to help. I'm not going to hurt you."

She could see that he didn't believe her. After all, why should he? She was suddenly very aware of her outfit. Some of these prisoners might have even seen her as Killer Frost, known her face and her bobbed blonde hair.

Above all, she saw herself in that curled position, saw the thinness and the terror and the lost eyes.

Cautiously, measuring her steps, she entered the room. "We're going to get you out of here, okay?" she said. The room continued to shake, and a cloud of dust burst down from the ceiling. "We're going to keep you safe."

The man whimpered. He had grayish eyes, eyes that never left Caitlin, not for a second. He must not have been in there long—he was not hostile, just scared.

"Who are you?" he asked. "Why should I trust you?"

She thought of the things she had done, what had happened the last time she had left the facility. What had happened while she was _in_ the facility.

"I don't know," she said simply. "I don't know why you would trust me. But nothing can be worse than in here, right?"

Wrong, she thought. That was wrong. But he bought it.

Barry was at her side, then, gripping another comatose man around the shoulders. "Be right back," he said. Before Caitlin could say another word, before she could offer any more reassurances, Barry zipped forward and grabbed the gray-eyed man from his cell.

Then she was alone.

She stared into the empty cell a moment longer, transfixed and somewhat lost, but there was no time to wonder. She left the door open and strode to the middle cell in the hallway, the only one left locked. The bolt stuck when she tried to open it, grating.

Finally she was able to wiggle it loose, hyper-aware of the falling chunks of rock, the dust that poured like rain, the rocking of the ground beneath her feet. She wrenched the door open.

A huge figure lunged toward her.

She had just enough cognizance to stumble backward as the prisoner, a woman two times her size, leapt out of the doorway, snarling. She had been prepared, at the ready. Her teeth were bared in an ugly grimace, her eyes yellow, her sandy hair frazzled and tangled. Again, she leapt for Caitlin.

Caitlin staggered sideways, carried as much by the earthquake as by her own fear, and the woman collided with the wall. There was a _screech_ as she fell down the wall, and it was then that Caitlin realized that she had claws instead of fingernails.

"Wait! I'm here to help you!" Caitlin screamed, to no effect. Between the alarms, the quaking, the bursting of broken rock, there was no way to make the wild woman understand. Caitlin turned to run, but her heel caught, and she stumbled. The woman pounced in her direction, claws outstretched.

_The soldier hit Frost hard in the gut, and she fell backward with a wheeze. Another kick to the ribs sent more air rushing from her body. The third kick was unnecessary, in her opinion. Just adding to existing bruises._

_"An escape attempt?" came Eiling's voice. "It's been a while since you've tried one of those. I thought I made it clear last time what would happen if you tried a stunt like this again."_

_Frost didn't respond, too winded, and Eiling placed a boot on her chest._

_"What did I say?"_

_"That you would go after my friends."_

_"I thought you believed me."_

_"I did."_

_Eiling cocked an eyebrow. "So why the sudden heroics now?"_

_"Because I don't have friends."_

The meta's nails were inches from Caitlin's face, gleaming dangerously sharp, when she was taken out by a blur.

Caitlin hit the ground, eyes wide, struggling to right herself. Breaths came fast and shallow. It was a moment before she realized that the meta had been taken out by Barry: Barry, knocking her bodily aside in midair. He nodded at Caitlin, also panting.

"I got you covered. Just a second."

The prisoner thrashed, tearing a gash across the torso of Barry's costume. He gripped her tighter and sped away again.

Caitlin took a moment on the ground to still herself, her heart beating erratically, painfully. The attack had shaken her to her core, unexpected as it was, and her limbs felt like jelly. Still, she had work to do. When she had control of her muscles again, she pushed herself to her feet and moved doggedly around the corner into the adjacent hallway, running her hand along the wall as she went to steady herself.

This hallway was clearer in her memory: she knew, immediately, that this was where she had been held. She stood, paralyzed, for a minute, unable to put a foot forward.

In reality, she was paralyzed for perhaps fifteen seconds—for just as she was getting up the courage to move into the hallway, Barry appeared again.

"That was a little harder than anticipated," said, sweat dripping from beneath the cowl. "What's up? Are there more in here?"

Caitlin blinked. Composed herself. "Yes," she said. "All of these cells should be full." She looked around, a thought tugging at the corners of her recollection. "I think there's a room around here with lab equipment, too. All of the serum development."

"Great," Barry said, and he zipped forward. As he worked on unlocking one of the cell doors, he glanced back at her. "Do you want to look for that while I work on getting all of these ones? If Eiling really is developing a permanent serum...maybe you can find all of the research and destroy it."

Caitlin nodded. The instruction, the purpose, was welcome. "Be careful," she said.

"Likewise." He swung the door open, swung open another, and was in and out of the both of them with the prisoners before she could say another word.

Without his lightning, the corridor that she stepped into was colder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Tune in Sunday for the penultimate chapter. What could possibly go wrong? :) As always, comments are life!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty excited about this chapter, and I hope you are too! The only warning here is for torture of the variety we've seen in the past. Nothing new, but it has been a while so probably best to flag it again.
> 
> Enjoy!

All of the locked doors were cells, Caitlin knew. She jogged past all of them, looking around wildly for the image that she remembered. Gray walls, locked door, wet floors. Red light, flashing maroon, the constant mantra of _Emergency alert. Please evacuate in an orderly fashion_.

At the end of the hall, she found it.

It was next to her cell, and she knew so for two reasons. One, because she recognized the door of the cell. Two, she could see the open, adjacent door that led to the observation room that looked into her cell. The observation room was dark, but she didn't have a reason to go in anyway.

Just past her cell, however, was what she had remembered seeing in those outings when Killer Frost had been led away for a mission. It was a large room, sealed in with grimy windows, a stark contrast to the stone and metal of the rest of the facility. Although either Cisco's earthquake or Iris' computer fingers had turned off all of the normal lights of the facility, she could see inside the room by the flashing red alarms.

She pushed herself inside, stepping over a fallen bookcase and the papers that had scattered out of it. More bookcases, plus racks of metal shelving, looked in danger of falling as well if this earthquake kept up. When she stepped further into the room, she crunched glass.

A crackle of light burst behind her. She spun back, but it was only Barry, continuing to empty the cells. By the looks of it, some were empty; he ran in and out of a few before disappearing again. Just Barry.

Caitlin turned her back on the hallway again and ventured further into the laboratory. It had been left in a hurry. Chairs were pulled out, containers left open, portable devices still glowing. In the dimness, it was easy to imagine the ghosts of scientists who had been here mere minutes before—the remnants of life giving the impression that a network of individuals had simply vanished all at once. A horror film. The rapture.

One source of life was a laptop which lay open on the table, displaying a colorful chart that Caitlin didn't have the time to analyze or understand. It was probably important. Caitlin picked up the laptop, lifted it above her head, and slammed it to the ground. Plastic cracked, keys scattered, glass buckled and broke, and the pieces of the machine sputtered in death

Her blood ran icy with the triumph of it. Amid the red flashing lights and the screeching of shifting rock, she made her way methodically through the room, overturning tables, tearing up papers, knocking over shelves of glass beakers and test tubes and syringes. She was an agent of chaos. With each crash, she felt the power come back into her blood. The smashing, the scattering glass, the screech of toppling metal and the flutter of ripped pages—it was something divine.

When she'd had her fill of the first round of destruction, her breath coming in short, labored gasps, she looked around the rest of the room and spotted an open case, filled with vials of different colors and sizes. She strode over to the case, no longer afraid, no longer distracted by the flicker-falter of movement in the hallway behind her, and pulled out the first vial.

 _Hypnota_ , it read. She frowned at it, looking at the rest of the writing, trying to decipher what looked like compounds and formulas. She set the vial back into the case, picked up another one. This one was a different color, with a different name. The third vial produced the same results.

That this was the serum, Caitlin had no doubt. Though she'd never seen the serum in this vivid coloring, or in this great a quantity, she knew intrinsically that the names on the outside of the vials were indicative of the metas the serums were intended to create. This was where the scientists went to create their monsters.

She smashed those as well.

This was even more satisfying than the last, if only for the fact that with each smashed vile, colors exploded across the floor in a spectacular rainbow display. Red, orange, purple. She had never seen something so spectacular, so deadly, so dangerous. One after the other, the vials collided with the concrete, and she paid no heed to the liquid that splashed up onto her boots, or the broken glass that collided with her ankles, littered the floor. The glass was like stars.

Finally she reached the vial she had been deliberately saving until last, a bright blue one that seemed to only gain vibrancy in the light of the alarm system. She picked it up almost reverently and twisted it to read the label.

 _Killer Frost_.

She had known that was what she had been called by Eiling, by the scientists, but it didn't make it hurt any less. She studied the words, written with such a careful hand, and wondered who had written them. Had it been a scientist she'd known? Or one that only knew her?

She gripped the vial tight, ready to drop it like the others, ready to see its crystal blue contents go scattering across the floor to join the rest.

But she couldn't.

She thought of the lunging metahuman prisoner, of the soldiers still thundering through the facility, of Eiling outside. Of her own fragility, her powerlessness, the prospect of being wrestled back into darkness for eternity. Her heartbeat rose to her throat, to her ears, drowning out everything.

A syringe lay discarded on the counter beside the serum case. She placed the vial back in the case, unstoppered it, and filled the syringe. The remainder of the serum she did toss, watching its sickly glimmer on the floor, but she kept the syringe tight in her palm.

With the serums destroyed, with everything else useful she could see destroyed, she roamed the rest of the room like a restless animal. A few binders were ripe for her destruction, but the fight in her blood was replaced by a new passivity, a watchfulness, a tension like she had sensed in Barry's muscles. Her own muscles were tight like a rubber band. The earth shook, and she rode the waves.

Then, it stopped.

There was a crash in the hallway behind her.

She paused.

On instinct, she pressed the needle against her skin and released the contents into her bloodstream.

With the earthquake halted, the sirens were louder. Even the red alarm light, which had been flashing constantly since Iris had activated it, seemed to have more of a distinctive presence without the rumbling and shaking of the earth around it. The sudden stillness made Caitlin queasy.

She set the empty syringe on a table and crept, slowly, quietly, out of the room.

"Barry?" she said. Her voice was too loud now. Far too loud. Surely there would still be soldiers here to hear her in the quiet. She stepped lightly, treading over the broken glass now instead of on top of it.

_Emergency alert._

All of the cell doors in the hallway were open, meaning Barry had managed to get all of the metahuman prisoners out of the facility—at least, the ones that had been imprisoned down in this cellblock. That was a good sign, right? Maybe Cisco had stopped the earthquake because Barry had taken him back to STAR Labs. Maybe they had succeeded. Maybe their mission was over.

But Caitlin remembered all too well the last time Barry had sped out of ne of Eiling's facilities, leaving her behind in the dust. And, even though she didn't want to believe it, the nagging feeling struck her: she was being left alone here once again.

A loose stone fell from the ceiling, a remnant of the earthquake, and the way it echoed in the corridor nearly made Caitlin jump out of her skin. She continued jerkily down the hallway. While the feel of the serum was no longer a foreign sensation, it still made her skin crawl. She felt it deep inside of her, deeper than it had ever been.

"Barry?" she whispered again. She thought she heard a shuffling from one of the cells, a groan. Not just one of the cells. Her old cell.

Each step forward was one that insisted she turn back. She knew she should retreat into the lab again, wait for Barry to come back for her. But she was done with waiting. And the power in her blood, mixed with the residual thrill of destruction, drove her forward.

She crept to the open doorway of her old cell and peered inside. Her chair was stationed in the center of the room like it had always been, though it was empty. On first glance, she thought the room was empty, too—until she looked past the chair and saw a figure crumpled on the floor, leaning against the wall.

"Barry." It was him. Once Caitlin's eyes adjusted to the darker setting, she recognized the red suit. She recognized the lightning.

His head jerked her direction. "Caitlin—Cait, look—"

Something stingingly cold clamped around Caitlin's neck. A hand shoved her forward. She reached up to pry off the metal that now dug into her throat, but before her fingers even met the foreign object, a shock blinded her.

The electricity sent her to her knees. When she blinked away the white spots, she was being lifted, dragged. She tried to struggle, her body knowing instinctively that it had to fight back, but the shock overwhelmed her already-weakened state. The person hauling her forward, throwing her into the hard-backed chair, was bigger than her, and stronger, too.

Her wrists were restrained. A door slammed. The red alarm light, not heeding the absence of further earthquakes, pulsed light through the observation room window. Caitlin dazedly lifted her head, blinked back her senses.

Surely the past day had been a dream. A hallucination. Surely she'd never left this god-forsaken place. Surely she'd been stuck in this chair for days. Eiling's face was behind the observation window. Barry was sitting on the floor, propped up in the corner. His hand was pinned to the wall by a viscous-looking gray substance, and by the ferocity with which he was struggling, it appeared the substance may as well have been cement for how stolidly it held him.

"Look familiar?" Eiling taunted behind the glass. It was all slipping back into place, all of the memories. All of the lack of memories.

Back to her senses, Caitlin began to buck against her restraints in earnest, not caring how much it bruised her wrists, not caring about anything but escaping the hell she was sinking back into. An involuntary sob rose in her throat. It was a broken, desperate thing, and she was ashamed of it the moment it came out of her mouth.

"I'll admit, you've saved me a lot of work," Eiling said. He held up Caitlin's discarded syringe. "Voluntarily injecting yourself with the latest version of the serum? You've done half of the job for me. Even if you were a bit of a pest along the way. The earthquake was a bit much, wasn't it?"

"Don't listen," Barry said. He continued clawing at the substance that encased his hand. "Caitlin, stay with me. Don't listen."

"I bet you don't know what's special about that particular serum," Eiling continued, ignoring Barry's stream of mutterings. "Want to guess what we've been working on?"

Caitlin didn't answer. Between the straps around her wrists and the metal digging into her throat, she didn't have the breath to answer.

However, she didn't have to. Eiling kept up his smug monologue without prompting. "We were discouraged by the short effectiveness period of our old serum. Of course, we've been steadily lengthening the potent period throughout your stay here. This is simply the crux of all of those developments. We have reason to believe that this batch of serum, for you and all of our metahumans here, is damn near permanent. Fitting, innit, that you injected yourself with it."

A part of her had known it, the minute she'd seen all of those vials. She could feel it taking over every system in her body, rewriting her DNA. What reason did Eiling have to lie? A permanent serum had been his goal, after all.

Her heart sank.

"I don't care," she said. "I don't care that I have powers. That's not what made me Killer Frost."

"Maybe if you repeat that enough, you'll sound convincing," Eiling said. "So, now that we're back in old habits, you know what to do. You haven't forgotten that, have you?"

Caitlin regarded Barry with horror. The speedster hadn't stopped struggling, and neither had Caitlin. When she realized what Eiling was suggesting, she strained in earnest. While her feet weren't bound like they usually were, the bindings on her wrists were like vices.

"I won't kill him," she said breathlessly. "You tried that already, remember? It's not going to work. You can't make me."

There was no _beep_ to warn her this time. The electricity came without pretense, without fanfare. It lit up every nerve in her body, and she was screaming when it stopped.

"Caitlin!" Barry was also yelling, and kicking his long legs like a caged animal.

"I'm ok-k-kay," Caitlin chattered. "I'm in c-c-control."

The statement was as much for herself as for Barry, but she wasn't entirely convinced of it. After the second shock, the ice had begun spilling out of her fingers, unbidden, dripping onto her leg and sliding down to the floor.

Another shock ran through her.

"Do you like the new tech?" Eiling said. "It isn't quite approved for deployment yet, which is why we didn't send it out with you the other night. But I think it works just fine, don't you?" He lifted up the small, handheld remote that was nestled in his palm. "Shock collar. Portable. So we can always keep an eye on you, keep you going the way that we want to go, even when you're not here with us."

As if to demonstrate, his thumb pressed down. Caitlin didn't have time to prepare. When the next shock passed, she couldn't catch her breath, her entire body seizing.

"Stop!" Barry yelled. "Please, I'll do whatever you want, I'll—"

"This is up to you, Frost," Eiling said. "Kill him, and this all stops. You don't have to feel any of this pain. The pain of the electricity, the pain of remembering…take your pick. Just kill him. It's easy, remember."

Caitlin's mind began sparking around the edges, shorting out, falling into old patterns. She had to maintain control, couldn't let this—

Another shock, and all of her resolutions were gone. She scrabbled for them, tried to cling to them with slippery fingers. That ringing noise that always came with the electric shocks was back, growing louder by the minute, and the frost was collecting on the chair. She couldn't hold it back. She couldn't keep it inside.

"Just a little deep-freeze," Eiling said. "Can you do that for me?"

The buzz of electricity, longer, a cacophony of agony, a screaming in her head, and she was slipping farther, farther…

"Give in, Frost. You know it's going to happen eventually. Why don't you just save yourself the trouble and get it over with?"

"I won't," Caitlin cried, even as her control slipped further, as the ice crept across the floor toward Barry against her will. The speedster drew his legs backward, away from the deadly, gleaming tide, his face stark with terror.

She was doused again, but this time she could feel through the electricity. The pain ignited her bones, ignited her soul with a fire that was 100 degrees below freezing point. She jerked, clawing her way out of the jolts that dug into her like ice picks, clawing her way out of the havoc and the pressure building in her head, feeling for that frost, for that avenue of escape—it was so easy, and it had always been so easy, to escape—

With that thought, in the middle of one of the electricity surges, she shrieked. And then she exploded.

She felt the cold leave her body, and she felt it as it burst outward and tore toward its destination. She was connected to it in that way she had always been, feeding off of it just as it fed off of her. She watched it, with a sixth sense, as it crawled across the floor and up the walls. She felt it hit its target. She felt it snuff out the warmth of life. She felt it tear through the bonds on her wrist, the shock collar on her neck.

When she opened her eyes, she couldn't see straight. Between the electrocution and the expenditure of energy, her vision was blurry and her muscles jellied. She thought she must have passed out, or she must have been dreaming. It took a few heavy blinks to re-emerge into reality.

The entire room, from floor to ceiling, was sparkling blue with ice. The chair was a throne of frost. The observation room window, once-impenetrable, was shattered. Eiling was frozen solid, his hand still raised with the remote in it.

The only space in the room not frozen was a circle around Barry, edging out a space inches from his body, but still perfectly controlled in its razor-sharp definition. Barry might have been frozen himself for how still he was, his eyes wide and fixed on Caitlin.

Caitlin took a moment before rising to her feet, feeling as though she was still walking through an unreality. At any moment, she expected the walls to bend around her and the scene dissolve as the vibes had. The shattered shock collar fell from her neck and smashed on the floor, and she stepped forward shakily.

"Let me help you with that," she said distantly, at Barry's side in two wavering strides. She kneeled on the ice, feeling oddly detached. Barry was the one to flinch away, then, a fact that made her pause. The moment was gone, however, when she reached forward and placed a hand on the sticky substance binding his hand to the wall.

It seemed so incredibly easy, now that she had frozen the entire room, and she wondered why it had never felt like this before. She probed forward with the cold, seeking out all of the miniscule fissures in the gray sticky-tack and stopping short just at the skin of Barry's hand. Then she released the full blast of cold.

The substance froze solid in an instant, and the next time Barry wrenched his arm, the gray material shattered and fell loose. Freed and entirely unharmed, though visibly shivering Barry rubbed at his wrist.

"How did you…"

"I don't know," Caitlin said. "It's done. I didn't hurt you, did I? Are you okay?"

Barry looked at her dazedly. "I'm f-f-fine. Are _you_ okay?"

"I think we need to get out of here," Caitlin said. "Did you get all of the metas out?"

Barry nodded. "C-Cisco's earthquake stopped. S-s-something must have happened."

"Let's go, then."

Their silence was clipped; not tense, exactly, but painted with a shortness that spoke of their mutual shock. They helped each other to their feet, mutually seeking support, and walked carefully across the slick floor. Neither looked back at Eiling.

Barry zoomed them both out of the facility as fast as they had come in, and Caitlin hardly had time to process the fact that they were outside when she was startled by a face coming into view inches from her own.

"Snow." It was Rose Canton, looking worn and frantic but also somewhat relieved. "Did you get everyone out?"

Caitlin's jaw worked, still trying to adjust to the night air and the sudden appearance of a face other than Barry's.

"I got all of them," Barry supplemented. "Caitlin destroyed all of the research, too. We're done here."

"I would say so," Canton said. She motioned.

Caitlin turned to look at where she was pointing. Barry had deposited her on the crest where Cisco and Canton had been hiding, and for the first time Caitlin saw the fruits of their planning.

Down the slope, near the entrance to the facility, the few dozen soldiers and dozen more scientists that had been in Eiling's employment stood with their hands up. Circling them was a veritable army of police, called by Joe, and TV crews, called by Iris.

"It's a sight, isn't it?" Caitlin tugged her gaze away from the scene and turned. She hadn't seen Cisco at first, where he sat on the ground. He propped himself up against a rock, clearly too weak to sit up on his own, blood pouring from each nostril. Despite it all, he was smiling.

"What's so funny?" Barry asked.

Cisco shrugged. "Just thinking how unusual it is for one of our plans to not go to hell."

That, Caitlin had to agree, was certainly something.

Canton nudged Cisco's food with her own. "Do you have one more blast left in the tank?"

Cisco's smile widened. "Yeah, I think we deserve a grand finale."

He didn't even get to his feet. He placed his palms flat on the ground, scrunched up his eyes, and pulsed with energy.

The sound of the facility collapsing inward was satisfying in a way Caitlin never could have anticipated. Even when Barry whisked them away from the danger zone, Caitlin could still hear the clamor and the calamity of falling rock and bending steel. It was a lullaby, she thought. A harsh, bitter, visceral lullaby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hella! Thanks so much for reading, guys. There is only one more chapter to go, so I hope you stick around for a nice big dollop of recovery to top it all off.
> 
> And comments make the world a brighter place!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've made it! Long thoughts below, but for now, enjoy an extra-long chapter.
> 
> Enjoy!

Iris' arms were the first around Caitlin when Barry deposited her back in the cortex, and for the first time, Caitlin returned the embrace.

"Thank God," Iris said. "Thank God you're safe."

"She was fantastic," Barry chimed in.

"Everyone was," Caitlin corrected, though her mouth was muffled in Iris' thick hair. Her hair usually smelled like strawberries, but the fruity scent was masked beneath that of sweat. Caitlin wondered how long they had been forgoing showers on her behalf.

"I don't doubt it." Iris pulled away, took Caitlin's face in her hands. The corners of her mouth creased. "You're really cold."

Caitlin's breath hitched. Barry cut in, thankfully, blurting, "Yeah, everyone was great. Cisco's earthquake really did a lot of damage."

"Two thumbs up for effectiveness, two thumbs down for rebound factor," Cisco said. He had collapsed into one of the hospital beds and lying with one arm thrown dramatically over his eyes, blood still leaking down the sides of his face from his nose. "Thorn was a life-saver, literally."

All eyes turned to Canton, who shrugged indifferently. "She may have stepped in when he passed out. The soldiers who got a little too curious were taken care of. Thorn held them off until the police showed up."

The group was moving slowly, almost unconsciously, toward the other empty hospital beds. Barry perched on one and started unzipping the top part of his suit, wincing. He was damp with sweat, that much was visible, and the leather stuck to his skin. Peeling away the front revealed the gashes where the animalistic meta's claws had raked across his chest.

The sight prompted Caitlin to ask, "Are all of the metas safe downstairs?"

Barry nodded. "We should go down to them soon, check up. Most of them are traumatized. And I'm not sure any of them know that this batch of serum is permanent."

Caitlin shuffled to the bed furthest away from the group, quietly pulling herself up onto it as Barry spoke. She felt the shakiness that she usually associated with extreme hunger. She knew that was probably part of it, but it was also a symptom of the adrenaline crash, the remnants of the electricity. She felt wearier than she ever had in her life.

"Permanent?" Iris said. "Eiling succeeded in creating that, then?" When nobody answered, Iris shook her head, defeated. "Well, I guess we should count ourselves lucky that you got out in time, Cait."

"I didn't." Caitlin looked up. Iris, Cisco, and Canton's heads all swiveled her way. Barry's eyes were still cast downward, uncomfortable. "I mean, he didn't...he didn't inject me. But I found the serums, all of the permanent ones, and I found the one meant for me. I got scared and I injected myself."

The silence was profound. On one hand, she didn't think she should move, break the silence in any way. On the other hand, she was too tired to care much anymore. She gathered up her pillow and blankets pressed the ball of them into her chest.

"Where are you going?" Canton said.

Caitlin shrugged, biting back her emotion. "I don't know. I just...I need...space."

Nobody begrudged her that. She half-expected someone to follow her, but the room was as quiet as midnight. She strode out without looking back, afraid her legs would give out beneath her, afraid she would break down then and there.

She didn't go back to the pipeline—she didn't ever want to go back to the pipeline again—instead finding a quiet corner in Cisco's workshop. She didn't know why she was drawn to that particular location; in the vastness of STAR Labs, there were plenty of abandoned rooms and secluded crannies in which she might be able to hide herself. Here, though: here was a room that was filled with things, the opposite of cold and empty, with signs of life spilling over tables and pinned to walls.

She didn't turn on the lights, preferring it dim, but moved through the space as though it were sacred. On her way through, she touched a scrap of material that looked as though it belonged to Barry's costume, a screwdriver, a stack of papers that she soon realized were printed-out articles that Iris had written.

Eventually Caitlin found the ragged old couch that Cisco kept in the back of his workshop. It was truly on the last legs of its life—literally, considering one of the legs was missing and replaced with two thick books. The dark green fabric of the couch sported dark coffee stains, a few loose strings, and enough fade that the color was barely recognizable. It was well-loved, though, as evidenced by how deep the cushions bent.

She knew that Cisco often slept here, when he worked so late on a project that he unwittingly dropped off to sleep, or when he was suffering from a period of night terrors so bad he needed a change of sleeping arrangements from home. She'd found him on this couch periodically, snoring.

She'd sat there too, sometimes, to read or to entertain him while he worked. On more rare occasions, they would set up a projector and she and Iris or she and Barry would sandwich Cisco on the couch after a long day. It was an unconventional arrangement, especially considering they had actual TVs and an actual break room with more seating, but sometimes the ragged couch was all they needed.

She sunk into the cushions now, feeling the warmth that they invariably brought—almost enough warmth that her blanket was unwarranted. With the serum, she wasn't cold, exactly, but something about the illusion of warmth was enough to motivate her. She propped her pillow against the arm of the couch, curled her legs up to her chest, and buried herself in all the comfort she could find. After everything that had happened, not just the past few hours, but the past few months, she didn't want to think. And she didn't have to, not if she could help it. For once, for one night, she wanted to find comfort in not thinking. With one more glance toward the open door at the other end of the room, almost invisible due to how secluded the couch was, she closed her eyes. And, blessedly, the exhaustion was enough to carry her into sleep.

* * *

As expected, she startled awake. She couldn't pinpoint why, or what she had been dreaming about, but she felt her heart pounding so fiercely in her chest she thought she must be having a heart attack. She looked down and saw her blue hands, the ice reacting to the fear. Reality in all of its jagged pieces shrieked down at her.

"It's okay."

The voice was another startle. Caitlin's legs were caught up in the blanket, restricted, so she thrashed in an effort to get away.

"Sorry, sorry. I think you were having a nightmare." Cisco raised his hands in surrender. He sat on the other end of the couch, as far away as he could possibly get from Caitlin. He looked as though he had just emerged from sleep as well. "I didn't mean to scare you."

Caitlin gulped in breath, tried to steady herself. The room was still dark, casting everything in gray. It was then that she realized what a mistake it had been to come down to a place without windows. She grasped just how much she disliked the persistent darkness, not knowing the hours. "What time is it?"

"Um." Cisco looked around for his phone.

"Five in the morning." Another voice. Just below Caitlin, on the floor by the couch, Iris lay curled on top of, and within, more blankets. Beside her blinked a groggy Barry, who interjected with a half-cognizant, "Whassamatter?"

"Your, uh..." Cisco nodded uncomfortably at Caitlin's hands. "Your hands. Do you need, uh, help?"

Right. They still glowed blue, frosty. "Sorry," Caitlin said. "No, I can...I can..." Her words trailed off as she concentrated. The familiar panic of the uncontrollable rose within her as she regarded her power, but she kept her breath level. She knew what she was doing. There was no need to—to panic. Gradually, the blue retreated, the frost begrudgingly relenting to her will. "Sorry," she said again.

"No need." Cisco said. "Sorry to barge in on you like this. I know you said you wanted to be alone."

The awakening had definitely been an unexpected one, Caitlin had to give him that. Barry and Iris shuffled on the floor, rubbing at their eyes, wrenched from likely a far deeper sleep than Caitlin had been experiencing. A pink blotch smudged Cisco's cheek where he'd been propping himself up on the arm of the couch.

"It's okay," Caitlin found herself saying. The lack of sleep, and the remnants of the nightmare, disoriented her. "I just wasn't anticipating..."

"We can leave if you want," Iris said. "If you don't want us around."

"Of course I want you around," Caitlin said, her throat burning. "But you need to sleep. You don't have to accommodate me. This isn't...I can handle it on my own. And I don't want to hurt you if...if I have another nightmare."

"Oh, Cait," Barry said. "You're not going to hurt us. You proved that back at the facility. You can control these powers—you exhibited amazing restraint back there. You saved my life."

"I know." Caitlin swallowed.

"And we're all here for you, for whatever you need," Iris said.

"I know," Caitlin said.

Cisco must have seen the way her throat bobbed, the way the tears were starting to leak from the corners of her eyes. "Do you want us to leave?"

She couldn't speak anymore. She just shook her head. Then, when the tears overwhelmed her, she sunk down onto her side. Cisco opened up, abandoning the scrunched-up, defensive posture at the other end of the couch. His hand found her hair as she rested her head upon his leg. She felt Barry and Iris press closer, too, soft in the sleepy dawn. Someone's hand found her knee, rubbing in soothing circles.

She couldn't count how many times in the past months she had cried herself to sleep. Back then, she had known that it was useless—she had known that shedding tears would make no difference to Eiling, that it was a literal cry into a void that did not notice or care. She had been alone on the floor of a gray cell with no inkling of what the outside world looked like, no hope that anyone cared enough to keep looking for her.

While she drifted off to sleep now, the sobs did not feel better. But they did, at least, feel different.

* * *

"I may have burnt the eggs a little."

"By a little, do you mean..."

"Cisco, this is why we should have let my dad cook."

"Easy." Cisco brought the pan of scrambled eggs closer to his chest protectively. "I made these with the heat of a hotplate, okay? It's hard to control the temperature. And I was distracted."

"By the bacon, which is also burnt, by the way."

Cisco looked mock-offended a moment more, setting the pan down on the table and breaking the levity only briefly to glance at Caitlin. She didn't participate in the banter, leaving all of it to Iris and Barry and Cisco, too intent on munching on a piece of plain toast. Iris had insisted she start off with the bland foods, so as not to upset her stomach, but she wasn't complaining. Miraculously, it was the one thing it seemed Cisco had not burned.

"Just because you all left the cooking up to me doesn't mean you get to criticize all of it," Cisco reprimanded. "Who wants coffee?"

"Is it as black as this bacon?"

"I swear—"

Caitlin managed a smile, setting down the half-finished toast to reach for her glass of water. It technically wasn't even breakfast-time. While she'd drifted in and out through the night, even taking to wandering the halls in one period of insomnia, she hadn't truly woken up until midday, and it seemed the rest of the team was just as sluggish. They all had needed the night to begin healing.

Still, perhaps in an effort to make things feel as normal as possible, Cisco had taken it upon himself to declare it a "good morning" when Caitlin finally emerged from her stupor and had wildly suggested a team breakfast. It had taken longer than anticipated to get ready. Caitlin moved slowly, stiffly, without speaking much. A well-intentioned shower turned into ungraceful panic attack; it landed her a humiliating rescue by Cisco and another hour on the couch.

"Go ahead, I'll be fine," she'd told a concerned Iris, who had been the first to check on her after the incident. "Eat without me."

They hadn't. Well, she had a sneaking suspicion that Barry might have, what with his metabolism, but he was among the shining and eager faces to greet her again when she managed to heave herself to the cortex.

She sat at the head of their impromptu breakfast table now, cross-legged in her chair, constantly trying to make herself as small as possible but finally allowing herself to bask in the glow of normalcy her friends were making such an effort to project.

"Do you want anything else?" Barry asked between bites of scrambled eggs. "Juice? Milk? I can run and get hot chocolate, or, or…"

"This is more than enough," Caitlin said. "Really. Thank you."

Barry nodded, and three more pieces of bacon disappeared from their skillet.

Caitlin flinched when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned, hugging herself, to see Canton striding into the cortex.

"Are you going to join us for breakfast?" Cisco asked cheerily. It seemed that all ill will toward Canton and Thorn had disappeared over the past three months; or, at least, since they'd saved his life the night before.

However, Canton just looked at him. "It's three in the afternoon," she deadpanned. Her gaze shifted to Caitlin. "How are you holding up, Snow?"

Caitlin gave a small shrug. Canton's chin dipped in understanding.

"That's alright," she said. "You'll manage. I know you will. And, hey, now that you have powers, maybe you'll join this silly band of costumes."

"Um." Caitlin rubbed the back of her neck, self-conscious. "Yeah. Maybe."

"Speaking of teams," Canton continued, "I need to be taking off. The metas are waiting downstairs."

At Caitlin's confused look around the table, Barry stepped in. "Sorry, you were asleep when we worked all of this out. Most of the metas in Eiling's care were early in the…process. They are stuck with these powers, and they're traumatized. Canton's going to manage their rehabilitation."

Canton shrugged. "Just try to get them back on their feet. Kind of like you did with me. I've been talking with them all day. Some want to get back to normal, but some have expressed interest in doing good with the powers they've been given." She looked meaningfully at Caitlin. "Street superheroes led by Rose and Thorn. What a terrible idea." But, past it all, Caitlin could see the pride. The purpose.

Caitlin untucked her legs and stood clumsily from her chair to fully face Canton. However, once she was standing, she didn't quite know what to do—a hug seemed too personal, a handshake too formal. So she stood, gulping, the distance between the two of them shorter than it had ever been.

"Thank you," she said.

Canton frowned. "For what?"

"I don't know," Caitlin admitted. "Just…everything."

She could've sworn Canton's eyes softened with emotion, just for a moment, but it was gone. The once-criminal cocked a smile. "Never would've guessed it, Snow. But here we are. I've got a lot to make up for, but I'm going to do the best I can with what I've got. I suggest you do the same." Finally she broke gaze and took in the entire group. "See you on the other side."

"Be careful," Iris offered.

Canton scoffed. "Like you'd know what that's like." A final nod, a fleeting, gracious smile, and she was out the door.

Caitlin took a seat again, folding her hands nervously on the table. "You didn't tell me that Canton was going to be taking all of Eiling's prisoners under her wing."

"Sorry, we discussed it late last night and this morning," Iris said. "Are you okay with that? We weren't sure if you—if you would want to be a part of that."

Caitlin considered it a moment, but she knew the answer already. "I think I need to work on putting myself back together first," she said. "I trust Canton's ability to help these people heal."

"That's what we figured," Cisco said. "You should've seen her these past few months. Oliver would be so proud of her vigilantism. I think she could do some real good with a team of street-level metas, if they're willing. Picking up some of the cases we don't catch."

"You just want to give them all superhero names, don't you?" Iris teased.

"The thought never crossed my mind." Cisco kicked up his feet onto the table, but Iris swatted them away.

Caitlin continued picking at her toast. The cortex grew strangely quiet as everyone continued to munch on their breakfast. The afternoon light streaked through from the high windows, warm and golden. Caitlin blinked slowly, heavily.

"Do you need to rest again?" Barry said. "We can clear all of this out."

Drawn out of her reverie, Caitlin straightened, shook her head vigorously. "No. Just…thinking."

As an experiment, almost a thoughtless impulse, she reached forward and brushed her fingers over her water glass. The frost surged, excited, through her blood toward her fingertips. She directed it, reigned it in just enough. The water did not freeze, but chilled.

It was only when Caitlin looked up from her test that she registered all of the stilled, maybe-terrified faces turned her way. She blinked, her jaw working.

"Sorry," she said.

Cisco was the first to jump back into action. "I've been thinking," he said. "I realize a power-suppressing serum is probably not the best idea, but I think I can translate the idea into some kind of technology. Like the Boot, but more stylish. Power-suppressing bracelets, or something."

But Caitlin shook her head. "No," she said. "I don't think I need to do that. I don't… _want_ to do that. These powers are a part of me now. I can't…I can't lock that up anymore. Or pretend like it's not there."

Cisco's eyes crinkled in the beginnings of a smile, but he looked back down at his eggs. "Maybe a costume, then."

Iris rolled her eyes, but she was smiling, too. "Give it a little time, Cisco."

Despite the good cheer around the table, Caitlin sobered. She chewed the inside of her cheek a while before saying, "I did a lot of damage. I killed people." When all three of the others began to interject, she continued, "I know I was brainwashed. But those people are still dead. And some of the metas in the pipeline—I may have been used to torture some of them."

She'd seen the look on the man's face when she'd opened the door to rescue him. _You're her. You're Killer Frost._ She remembered, too, everything that had come before, beginning with a day ages ago, when she'd poisoned Rose Canton in the middle of a police station in order to save her friends.

"It's getting harder to follow my own advice," she confessed, swiping at a tear. "Eiling always said that I was like ice. That I would break before I would bend. And now that I'm broken, I'm not quite sure how to put myself back together like before."

Iris reached across the table for her, though she didn't reach back. "I think the first step is realizing that things aren't going to be like before. It's just a new piece of the puzzle you'll have to fit in, somehow. What Eiling did to you…it's unspeakable. But Killer Frost is dead now."

"No," Caitlin corrected suddenly. "Killer Frost is alive. She just has a name now."

Quiet, quiet. A monitor flickered, briefly, a muted map of the city on a cracked monitor. So much of this lab was broken, but the worst had been swept up during the night. Only a few traces remained of her rampage from the other day. Already it seemed like an eternity ago.

An eternity ago, also, was Jason—Jason, who still lurked at the edges of her anxiety, who had somehow, improbably, started it all.

 _Your_ accident _created abominations that have unchecked power to cause calamity._

"I'm going to need some time," Caitlin stated plainly. "I don't think I can just step back into old routines. I'm not going to become some instant superhero. I need time to rebuild."

"And we'll give it to you," Barry said brightly. "A lot of people in your position wouldn't be sitting here right now. You're doing so well already."

Caitlin offered a wet laugh. "I can't even shower without breaking down."

"We'll put up with the smell," he said faux-valiantly.

"You take all the time you need," Cisco reassured. "You lost months of your life."

"We'll be there every step for you," Iris said. "To rebuild."

Caitlin blinked upward against the tears, unable to look at any of them. Her eyes traced a fracture along the ceiling of the lab. Even though it had undoubtedly been there for years, a remnant of the explosion, she had never noticed it until now. This room was so bright—and, more importantly, warm—and she could see so much more now that she looked skyward.

Harrison Wells had once waxed poetic about how they were creating a future, creating good. He'd said as much just before the particle accelerator sent its dark matter rippling through the city, creating metahumans; creating the crack in the ceiling; creating, through a series of inexplicable events, the moment in time she found herself in now.

Perhaps they hadn't created good. But they hadn't created evil, either.

"I'll take some eggs," she said finally, quietly. She tore her eyes away from the ceiling, the tears streaking into her hair, and met Cisco's startled gaze levelly.

"Are you sure?" he said, glancing sideways at the suspicious-looking pan of scrambled eggs. "I can make some better ones. These are a little burned."

"They're perfect." And her smile came a little easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's done! I'm really bad at these end notes and I am unbelievably sappy, so I'll try to keep it brief:
> 
> Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to keep writing, to keep expanding this series, to explore places I was nervous to explore. Hedgi, Fern, PaperKatla, my idea-bouncers. Those of you who inexplicably stayed through a three-part series, and, what's more, took the time to comment and send messages that make me giddy. Thank you for being so generous with your time and your ideas.
> 
> I'm not sure what the future holds for my fanfiction, but you have been such a wonderful source of encouragement for my writing, wherever it goes from here. I'm so happy and proud to have this series completed, in no small part because of you all. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for everything you have given me. Through intense periods of frustrations, fears, and self-doubts, you were there with a positivity that never failed to surprise me.
> 
> If you want to chat further, find me on Tumblr at pennflinn. Goodbye for now, and happy holidays to everyone!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


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